Filling your time with passion

OK. You know you want to live with passion. But what you have is a 8+ hour a day job, the chores of cooking, paying the bills and visiting your wife’s boring relatives. Where is the time left for living fully?

First of all, you must establish what is really important to you in life. It is incredibly easy to take more and more responsibilities and “things to do”. But there are some natural limits. Fortunately, also some cures.

1) Often, if we think of things as “chores”, we dawdle. We delay. We read the newspaper. We do anything to push the view of the unpleasant task to behind our mental horizon. This is called resistance, and it is very natural. However, we often waste more time procrastinating than the job itself would cost. Train yourself to stop procastrinating, and your productivity will jump. See also Mark Forster’s book “How to get everything done – and still have time to play.”

2) Every activity can be unlimited in perfection. Do you want to have a shiningly clean house every day of the week, or are you content with doing the dishes daily and vacuum cleaning weekly? Of course one can say that everything is important, but you can always look to which level of activity is sufficient. Then schedule the time for that. Perhaps it even helps in that time to try to work as fast as possible, do a match with your previous personal record. This makes the activity more fun, challenging and productive.

3) Set a limit to the number of things you want to do. Don’t disperse yourself too much. If you have a major hobby but cannot spend at least half an hour-45 minutes a day doing it (except in emergencies) you are cluttering yourself too much. Arnold Bennett in “How to live on 24 hours a day” even recommends having 3-4x1.5 hour a week for concentrating on an interest.

A second problem for many people is: but I do have some time, there is just nothing interesting to do in that.

To these people (to which I often belong myself too) I must say that knowing what interests you demands that you spend time in finding it out. It almost never “pops out of thin air” while you are moaning in your chair about the undefeatable boredom of life. There are plenty of self-help books which recommend courses of action to find your passion, whether that is in a job or in the rest of your life. And often passions flow from one field of interest to another. Better to get started on a 7 than waiting till a 9 drops on your head. And be aggressive about trying new things.

The only criterion that I would give for a good passion would be that it involves more than being a spectator. The more creative you can be, the more you can learn, the better it is. So even if you have a passion for soap series, it would be much better not to spend all your spare time in watching soaps. Make a soap-related website, write a book on the structure of soaps, think of your own soap-series, whatever. As soon as one is not only a consumer, but also a kind of producer, your expertise and passion will soar.

Tomorrow I’d like to tie up some loose ends, and perhaps find new ones…

Eric-Wubbo and The Meaning of Life

In the previous sections I wrote –and along the way, discovered- that a good life should include some choices to keep the body in a good shape. Eating, sleeping, exercise, but also having contact with other people, learning/exploring, and studying/modifying your thoughts and regulating your habits and emotions would be necessary for optimal well-being. This, however, is not enough.

After all, if all one does is surviving, one can spend one’s time to the end of his/her days, but this may not result in much progress. While evolution takes care that some development occurs, even in fishes, which are not known for their particular service to arts and sciences, in human beings, who in most Western societies do not have to spend all their time on survival and procreation (the latter due to legal and practical limits), one has to choose what one does after one has done the “day’s job”. Just learning and socializing may be good for the body, but it would seem pointless in the end. Just as more sports would lengthen life but take time and therefore not lengthen the time of life outside sports, “maintenance” should be a part but not the whole of our remaining time.

The meaning of life… Even Monty Python could not answer this question convincingly. Of course philosophy without observation does not give much useful info.

But if we look experimentally, to people who have, by societial standards, both been good for society as well as relatively happy people, we see that they often had a purpose or a hobby or something that they really liked to do. Edison liked to invent, Rembrandt liked to paint, Franklin liked to improve living, Einstein liked to discover the laws of nature. Or, perhaps better put, they loved to do these things.

So after the work is done (or hopefully, on work where you can use a large part of your passion), the people who follow their passion would seem to be most happy in the end.

Still, we must look at the “practical constraints”.

First, while some people are naturally passionate about many things, or already have found their passion, many of us do not have a passion to speak of.
Secondly, being excited about something does not always do us good. Just as we developed a predilection for sweet foods when that sweet food was ripe fruit, this predilection will lead us astray (and to caries) if we overindulge in the artificial sweets that nowadays are rampant throughout our society. So while passion is good, a passion for eating candy or for computer games might not benefit you or others much.
Third, there are other things to do than following your passion. There is administration, washing, cleaning, etc. How to set borders there?

It seems that there is still something left to think about… Perhaps for tomorrow.

Rule by reason, rule by feeling?

All our impressions come to us via our body: this contains the senses. While signals may originate from within the body, the body is the medium that transfers them to a specific part of the body, the brain, which processes these signals. The two remaining parts of a human are the thoughts and emotions. Except that they originate and are “sensed” by the brain, what can we tell about them? And how do they affect living well?

When studying the emotions one comes to the conclusion that their goal is to propagate the body’s genes (and thereby the emotions themselves). Fear protects the body against external harm by avoiding danger, anger allows one to obtain needed resources even in the face of opposition, sadness saves energy and makes one avoid situations which are not pleasant or that are unproductive (depression being the ultimate result of the feeling that nothing you do matters), and joy reinforces the body that the current situation is good, and makes us actively seek out opportunities for repetition.

Where does that leave the mind?

In all probablility, some animals do not need a mind since their world is simple and predictable and reflexes suffice. However, especially for large, long-living animals the environment may change, and also they have more possibilities to affect the environment. Being preprogrammed to deal with such changes is practically impossible, so the human brain has evolved the power to store and remember and combine concepts encountered. Where emotions are not directly roused, the mind finds the link between the current situation and emotions (if applicable) and therefore guides action. In contrast with what you see on "Star Trek", where the Vulcans have abandoned emotions in favour of ratio, the ratio in itself is not enough to take decisions since it cannot intrinsically tell us what is good or not good. Without emotions to bring the message home, even a question of "It is good that I cross this busy freeway without looking?" becomes impossible to answer, since something is only rational in the respect that it achieves a goal, but the goals themselves (or rather, their value) cannot be determined by the ratio. And even if a rational creature would decide that survival is a good idea, the extra energy and impetus given by emotions would help in reaching such a goal, so emotions would evolve anyway.

One could say (as Mattias Alexander has said) that we evolved on the savannah and our current “reflexes” and emotions have been adapted to a world that no longer exists. So while (in his case) walking poorly might have been a natural reflex to the unnatural circumstances in which humans live today (and are only very slowly evolutionally adapting) one needs knowledge and the mind to steer the process and complete what the emotions were needed to do: ensure optimal survival and procreation of the organism.

Does that leave no place for emotions except as default parameter settings to be tweaked by the mind after it has deliberated the situation? Not entirely. Our brains are built in such a way that we often obtain knowledge without being conscious of it. In experiments where volunteers had to repeatedly choose cards from one out of two stacks, most were found to pick more cards from the stack with the highest average, even though they were not conscious that this stack was better, or even that they were picking more cards from it! Often, other learning processes precede those of the rational mind, and complex decisions can certainly not be reasoned about with full certainty, because logical laws and absolute facts are seldom available. In this case, we should trust our intuition instead of ratio. While rational thinking may be good for solving a math problem, buying a house or choosing a job are so complex that intuition and feelings are necessary. Feelings also give feedback on how well your body thinks you are doing. Ignore them at your own peril.

The lesson of today and yesterday are thus:
1) the mind and emotions are intended for the well-being of the body, especially for survival / reproduction.
2) Thoughts can be unreliable because of fallacies. Investigate the most important or persistent thoughts on reality.
3) Emotions can be unreliable since we do not live on the savannah anymore and the world is quite complex. The only way to investigate them is to use your thoughts.
4) Pure rational thinking is good for problems with few unknowns and lots of absolute laws. For complex problems on which little data is available, intuition should be chosen. Preferably use them both, when conflicting ratio should prevail when your reasoning is fool-proof (as in careful mathematics). In any case it might be good then to investigate your intuitions and feelings to see which information they bring.
5) Your feelings may not always be right, but they do give you information. If the information is correct, you profit, if it is not, use your thoughts to try to modify your feelings so they are based on a more correct version of reality.

Of course, philosophy is not of much use unless it is applied. Next time I hope to look at living again, and choices.

The Wholy Trinity

Usually when people talk about health, physical health is meant. When your physical health is not good, you are in pain and/or incapacitated to do certain things (above the natural limits of humankind, such as not being able to lift 1000 kg in one hand). However, mental and emotional problems can have exactly the same effects, and should therefore be considered too, next to diet and exercise, to find the right way of living.

All of us know that all people need some food and some sleep. Most of us know that regular exercise will make life longer and healthier. However, the cross-correlations between body and mind are less clear.

First, (aerobic) exercise and even talking walks makes the mind sharper and protects against dementia, as research has shown. So bodily exercise can improve the mind.

However, not all health can be attained via the well-known physical channels of diet and exercise. In one experiment of a mad German king, where babies where fed and given drink, but their nurses were not allowed to hold them or talk to them, the babies all died. Therefore it seems necessary for emotional as well as physical wellbeing to have contact with other people, “strokes” as psychologist Eric Berne would call them. Pursuing (and giving) strokes, that means, social interaction, should therefore also be part of a “healthy diet”. As in food and exercise, there would be an optimum which might be different for each person. Schizoid persons apparently do not need strokes, the rest of us should find a good level.

Some mental diseases can fortunately be treated by drugs, since mental diseases are brain diseases and so actually physical diseases. However, it appears that some of them also respond to cognitive therapy. This suggests that optimal mental health might benefit from “mental exercises”.

For a part, this is already known. The health of rats in cages where they could have both social contacts and play/explore was optimal, probably people need novelty and exploration/ learning as well as the strokes. So this would be an extra ingredient for mental health. However, cognitive psychology shows that we can go even further than searching for a more stimulating environment: we should also go and study and possibly change our own thoughts.

One’s thoughts and feelings have a tremendous impact on one’s life. One of my father’s siblings was a very morose and complaining man; he always complained (and probably believed as well) that “the world was against him”. Outside the fact that he did not gain much happiness with this lifestyle, he also did not gain a good job (he remained a clerk while his brothers were promoted to be bosses of something), nor much money. However, a cognitive psychologist worth his fee would have asked him what were the proofs before and against his thoughts.

After all, many of our thoughts are biased. For the curious, I’d recommend the book “Feeling Good” by David Burns, which lists common fallacies people use in their own thinking and thus in their own life. Overgeneralisation (everyone hates me), focusing on the negative (I hurt my toe – my whole week is ruined), fortune-telling (she will say no), black-white thinking (if this presentation is not perfect, I’m a total failure). There are more fallacies, and while most of the examples here sound obviously wrong, you’d be surprised when investigating your own thoughts how many would not stand up to careful analysis.

Investigating and checking (and adapting) one’s own thoughts is therefore a key to not only more happiness but also to more realistic thoughts, which enable you to deal better with the real world than if your thoughts were distorted.

Next time I hope to go further into the relationships between body, mind and emotions, hoping that a synergy is achievable.

A job for you

Yesterday evening it occurred to me that basic needs, such as sleeping and eating, are commonly extended with protective measures. Internal and external factors can endanger us, be it gems, warfare, criminals or natural disasters. What use is building a nice house if it is blown away by a wolf? One could say that protection is the second layer. However, this realization also gave me a second insight.

Next to eating and sleeping, people need protection from dangers that could destroy or incapicitate them. Dangers can take many forms: violence, bacteria, accidents, fires, criminals and floods.

In general, many of these dangers are so rare or powerful that, in contrast to eating and sleeping, we do or can not take care of them ourselves, but have created occupations. Firemen protect against fire, soldiers and policemen against evil people, doctors, pharmacists and nurses against disease. Of course, occupations also exist for the “lower” level: people who take care of feeding and food provision, such as farmers, fishermen, butchers and bakers. This leads to the insight that in general each occupation provides for a human need.

In contrast to the food/sleep layer, the protection layer is only necessary on relatively rare occasions. People spend some resources on them, as a sort of insurance. That does not mean that all protection is necessary; for society it is always a balanced question how much resources should go to security. After all, it is impossible to control everything and everyone, a very safe society is also a very expensive society, see for example the enormous costs of modern healthcare. In general, the level of protection is determined by society. For private matters, such as insurances, people must judge themselves whether the precautions are worth the costs.

Probably there is some optimum: in a deprotected society, individuals may not live long enough to contribute, the uncertainty that your machines may be stolen tomorrow would discourage investment in larger things and increased efficiency. In despotisms and kleptocracies such as Maharadjah-ruled India this was the unfortunate case. However, in a hyperprotected society, nothing new can happen and no growth/development is possible since all effort is spent in maintaining the status quo, like in ancient Sparta. The optimum is probably somewhere in the middle, but its location should be judged by different criteria than safety.

Speaking of doctors and nurses, we should also consider the functioning of the individuals. A human life which is spent in paralysis and pain is not only practically useless for the human in question, it is also bad for society. Therefore we could probably state that optimal health (or workable health, since optimal health would be as expensive and impossible as optimal protection) – workable health therefore should be a reasonable goal of all living human beings, as long as they have a chance of obtaining it.

Health is commonly defined as something physical, but it has two additional and interwoven aspects: mental and emotional health. I hope to expand on this subject tomorrow.

My new philosophy

In the musical “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown” there is a cute song by Sally, Charlie Brown’s little sister. It is called “my new philosophy”. Apparently, Sally’s philosophy changes every other minute, giving a short but whirling show in which even simple concepts like “No!” are elevated to philosophical status. However, recently I found out that I too needed a new philosophy…

After all, I was wondering myself what would be the right way (or the right ways, or right-like ways) to live. And I realized that “right” and “wrong” are only applicable to goals. If you go to Amsterdam, that can only be right or wrong according to your intention whether to go to Amsterdam or to Paris.

So what would be a good direction to go? Philosophers and theologicians have debated these questions for centuries. However, using just “reason” or a vague God they had little data on which to make a decision, leading to either indecision or to awkward and inflexible lifestyles. It seemed clear to me that one needs an “experimental” theology or philosophy of life.

If one considers the activities by humans (life is a stream of activities and choices), one finds out that much time is spent in only a few pursuits: eating, sleeping, and going to the toilet. This is also biological necessity; if one doesn’t do that, one will not survive. Considering Darwinian selection of religions/philosophies, one of the prime concepts would therefore be surviving.

In practical applications this would mean to firstly take care of the body: sleep well, eat well. For eating, one should not eat too much, eat balanced and healthy food (vitamins and fats and carbohydrates and proteins, note the diet and read a good, preferably scientifically-based book), and take care for things such as teeth. So eating well and sleeping well would be the prime directives. This seems to be a good basis to start.

The Chamber of Secrets

I like this title. Probably not the book though, though Harry-Potter books are generally very well-written. But today I do not want to talk about Harry Potter, but about secrets.

The ability to distinguish a secret from a non-secret is a thing that, as every parent can tell you, is not innate. Countless are the jokes/anecdotes such as

Aunt: My, Johnny, you are very silent today!
Johnny: That's because mummy promised me 2 dollars if I would not say anything about the big wart on your nose.

While secrets do come natural in a way (children love secret societies, though they can be so enthusiastic that they start to brag about them), it is a long and often painful process to learn what is and what is not acceptable to say. It is OK to say that your father is a doctor, it is not OK to say that your mother is 45 years old. It is OK to say that your brother has won a scholarship, it is not OK to say that your sister weighs 300 pounds.

Of course, as a kid you are most often heir to the little, harmless secrets, mainly because people out of vanity try to pretend to be otherwise than they are, though fooling people in such cases is mostly vain hope: if you are 300 pounds, people might think you are between 275 and 325 pounds, but they will not think that you are a hundred pounds.

For bigger operations and bigger interests, secrets can be vital. In war and politics, when the security of millions is at stake, politicians and generals must often hide the truth and protect it, as Winston Churchill said, "with a bodyguard of lies". Secrecy and lying are not sins then, but virtues. Fortunately, hiding the truth and telling lies are things most politicians are quite experienced in, so this gift can easily be called upon in times of need.

Nevertheless, "secretive" is seldom a adjective that is used in a positive way. For your enemies you may be secretive or blind them with lies, secrecy to your friends can unsettle them. Friendship is often based on reciprocity, and if you tell something to another, especially something you would not tell to most people, you expect the other to return a similar story, so the information power balance remains the same.

But let us talk about my secrets. In particular, my experience with secrecy in science.

Secrecy in science is already very old. If I am correct, when Isaac Newton had discovered calculus he kept it a secret for over ten years. Why? Perhaps he hoped to use it so solve many more scientific problems than his colleagues who were still groping in the dark with outdated mathematical tools. Knowing more than your opponents gives you an advantage.

Of course, after a while this went awry since Newton was not the only brilliant man in the world. The German Leibnitz discovered -and published- calculus, and became quite famous. This meant that now Newton not only had to contend with competing scientists who had tools as good as his, but also that some people considered Leibnitz the inventor of calculus! A long and bitter feud ensued in which Newton used his scientific reputation and influence to crush Leibnitz. A waste of two talents. Nowadays, though we must consider Newton to be the true inventor of calculus, we should approve the behaviour of Leibnitz more since he gave his invention to the world willingly. Whether he did this to achieve fame and fortune is not so important at this point; the effect outweighs the motivations, and the effect was that mathematics took a large step forward, in contrast to the effect of Newton's shadowy proceedings.

Undoubtedly, there are still many minds around, perhaps not equal to Newton in terms of genius, but certainly equal to him in terms of secrecy. The chance that you will profit much by keeping your invention secret has dwindled enormously, especially since nowadays patent offices give rights to the first one who files a patent, not to the first inventor who kept his findings to himself. Also there are now so many scientists that the chance that your invention will be rediscovered within a few years is quite large. Yet there are still many secretive persons.

Is this good? According to Nobel-prize winner Peter Medawar, in his booklet "Advice to a young scientist" it is not. First of all because exchanging ideas and criticizing another's research is a key feature of science that serves to refine and test your ideas. Two brains is always better than one, just as the optimal size of a programming team is never less than two. Second, if you are secretive about your research, others are also less willing to share their experiences with you. Applied consistently, this would lead to secretive science which would only proceed with the speed of molasses. The third reason is that such paranoia is usually unnecessary: most scientists are so in love with their own subject and/or so busy with their own research, that they cannot or will not take time to hijack yours. According to Medawar, the illusion that everyone in the world wants to steal your research is a cute misconception fostered by the youngest and most naive of scientists.

And, perhaps, by others.

While in my undergraduate studies at the Free University I never was commanded to keep my work a secret, this changed as I went to another university and another professor for my PhD-studies. One day, about two months after I had started, he told me: "Do not tell people outside our group what you are doing here. A better, bigger group may hear it and beat us in the publications." While I argued that the dangers of such were small, and that it would not be wise to arouse suspicion and isolation by remaining silent about my research, my promotor was not convinced. So I heard and obeyed, describing my research only in the most general of terms.

When a course on computational techniques made me write an essay on how I wanted to use computational techniques in my own work, I was ordered to hide the truth and come up with another research idea using computational techniques, something I would probably not do but which would be useful for substituting the truth. Actually this went quite well (I got a new and, in my view, interesting idea for research), although it gave a somewhat awkward situation two years later when one of the course leaders, who is a professor at Utrecht University, asked me how the research I had pretended to do was going.

And, although I cannot prove it, this same promotor (I have three) also discouraged me from writing about my research, until the thesis came very close and the other promotors insisted on publication of my main research. While this may be justified somehow since by now we had almost finished the commercial version of the software, it forces me to write all my articles in the last year of my PhD-study, which is hard work. Also, since writing articles generally helps you to sharpen your ideas and get ideas for further research, this has given me little time to improve my work with their inspiration. There are things to be said for the traditional cycle of research-write-research-write, instead of research-research-research-write-write-write. Advice to starting PhD-students: write articles as soon as you are able, and if your promotor disallows publication, write them as if they should be able to pass peer-review. You will learn much and get new ideas.

Now the end of my PhD-study is nearing. The bonds of obligation of secrecy will be broken as soon as my contract ends, for then my employer is not my employer anymore, and since there is no standard competition clausule in a PhD-students contract - after all, we are supposed to be educated, not to spend four years learning but not being allowed to use what we have learned- and my hands and mouth will be free again until I choose another employer to bind them as he will - though I will prefer to choose one who doesn't bind them too strictly.

This situation was of course clearly unacceptable to my professor. While he cannot legally control me when the university doesn't pay me anymore on a mutual consensus, that did not discourage him from trying to control me from "over his grave". Back to the chamber of secrets…

So a month or two ago I found my professor in my office waving a three-page contract, to his own admission copy-pasted from the internet, which forbade me (and my students and colleague) to make any information about the Molecule Evoluator public which had not been made public before. Forever. Actually I would scarcely have believed my promotor would be content with controlling me merely for eternity, but here it was in black and white.

Of course my professor presented it differently (especially when I had said that I saw no advantage of signing that contract which did not seem to do me any good and also was not obligatory for me to sign as I am no employee of his company), he said it was not meant to make me silent, but to reward me for all the hard work I had done inventing and implementing something that could yield money. Also it would come handy for him if investors wanted to know that no-one else could use inside information to come up with a competing product.

In any case, after some legal advice, I have asked him to at least come up with a Dutch version instead of an English one (legal language is difficult enough, and even more so if it is not in your mother tongue) and make a clausule that this contract will not hinder me in making publications for my thesis.

Upon which my professor exclaimed that I was among friends and that the contract was not meant to hinder me in publications. It just didn't say so. And translating such text is difficult enough, and he wanted to do this just without any of that expensive legal fuss.

Perhaps it is a problem that someone experienced in programming computers, such as myself, knows by bitter experience that computers do what you command them, not what you intend them to do unless you command them correctly what you intend them to do. For now I therefore insisted on clarity. Let what we mean also be what we say, that there may be no grievous misunderstandings between each other, in which I do what my promotor has thought he had forbidden me to do but which he had not because of a poorly-composed contract. As my father's promotor said to my father "Goede afspraken maken goede vrienden" - "Good agreements make good friends."


However, I should in this story not suggest that all scientists are thus: one of my other promotors encourages free and elaborate publication. Perhaps this is because he believes in it, or because in his particular field of computer science you generally cannot earn much money with ideas themselves, usually only by combining lots of ideas and implementing them.

What should we therefore conclude from this tale?

Secrecy may be necessary for war and commerce, for science in general it is bad, though for individual scientists it may be occasionally good. Would private benefit outweigh public cost? This is a choice made by many individuals, but it generally does not reflect well on humanity, looking at for example the littering of public parks. You cannot hold something without being caged by it, and you cannot have a house full of jewels without guarding it. Perhaps the best scientists are those who do not burden their minds with keeping secrets and coveting riches, but those who use that brain capacity to generate and communicate new ideas and their days to work and build instead of to hold and protect.

Let me now be silent in respect for the persons who gave me with this PhD-study the possibility to pursue a career in science. Let me absorb their wisdom and lessons, and let me throw aside the fetters and repulse those ideas which I cannot agree with. Let the secrecy of promotors be like the crutches of a man who has broken his leg; circumstances may make them necessary, but by choice the man would want to walk freely on his own two legs and throw the crutches aside as soon as their service has been done. I do not know whether my intellect and creativity will outweigh my openness and morality if I would further pursue a scientific career, but for now I hope I can go on and further, as far away as possible from the Chamber of Secrets.


Thought for today:

It is interesting and useful to talk not only to, but also with God. If you are willing to listen, you can hear God answering your prayers and your complaints. Have a conversation with him. He is your Friend. Though your partner in this dialogue may not be the real God, it may be just the God-like part of you which can distance itself from your own habits and viewpoint and give some wisdom, perspective and advice in return.

Why not talk with God today? If He has something interesting to say, write it down.