Tag: meaningoflife

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F*ck Death

Someone died on the trail while we were hiking up the White Mountains in New Hampshire. They were giving him CPR for ages while his daughters leaked tears on a log nearby. When he was clearly and truly irreparably dead, we hiked past and I saw his pale, hairy leg with a scrunched up sock and hiking boot peeking out from the foil sheet. Hikers who’d helped give CPR later remarked, “I could feel his ribs cracking underneath my hands.” It was a sobering incident although a few hours later I still made a joke about the hike being a death march due to my vibrams.

Death is gross and terrible. I told my dad we should get cryogenically frozen and he said he’d look into the paperwork- my good old dad. I feel immense guilt it never occurred to me to freeze Mom even though I knew freezing existed. I think I was in a state of denial about the likelihood of her death since she’d been getting better for a long time and got worse quite suddenly so my dumb brain didn’t weight the new information correctly. Dying, like, goes against her identity as a cool Mom, right? The brain doesn’t handle affronts to identity very well.

Dying is deeply disgusting. Picture ragged roadkill or other dead animals you’ve ever seen flopped over stiff and grimacing- that’s what people are like when they’re dead too. I’d like to imagine death as one peacefully drifting off, looking as though one were sweetly asleep, but death is not like that. Death is ugly and repulsive. Mom was probably seriously dying for a good 6 months or so and I wish I could erase all of that from my memory. Is it wrong that I wish I could have frozen her before her organs started to rot inside her still-breathing body? I don’t want to think about her like that- I didn’t then and I definitely don’t now. But I did, and I do. I think about her and her death all the time. I wanted it to stop, and although she’s dead now it hasn’t stopped for me because it still happened- Mom being dead never stops.

Although Mom believed in heaven and her church friends were always with her, she didn’t want to die. She wasn’t in peace; she was in pain. I feel bad we didn’t try everything. I could’ve done more research but I didn’t want to get closer to it. I wanted it to stop and leave, a weak and contemptible reaction that proves I’m shamefully unworthy of stuff, like being a great samurai, or being a good daughter.

If I found out I had incurable cancer, I wouldn’t get the haphazard treatment that weakens you everywhere while you suffer and stall in waiting rooms that reek of poison, everyone pathetically shuffling around, or sadly staring, or desensitized and businesslike, or just normal- pragmatically ignoring doom. If I had cancer, I’d go to sleep on an ice floe and float out into the Arctic among the icebergs and the sea lions like an old, useless Eskimo. I’d wander alone towards my ancestral graveyard like an elephant matriarch and collapse on my knees in a pit of ancient bones. (Years later a lion king will play in my rib cage.) Or maybe there’d be some project I could do like fix a nuclear reactor that’s too dangerous for healthy people to approach, although they probably have robots or something for that.

It doesn’t hurt anybody for us to get frozen and the main reason against it is because people will think you’re weird. Whatever- the “weird” ship sails whenever it sails. Now that Dad said he’d do the paperwork, the main deterrent for me to do it was actually the clangy jewelry you’re supposed to wear at all times that says to send you to Alcor so they can put you in your freezing pod or whatever. Does anyone know if medical people will still realize it’s medical information if I get a cuter version made? I don’t wear jewelry typically and the thought of going from bare to ugly jewelry horrifies me.

Friends, let’s all get frozen. That way when I wake up in 1000 years in my robot body you’ll all still be there and we can all battle the evil Galactic Empire together and learn to control our psychic powers and flirt with hot aliens.

I hate death and maybe that’s why I think about it a lot. Animals are almost lucky because they can just die like it’s nothing, like it’s supposed to happen, an instinct encoded in their DNA. Animals live and die and nothing they do can be Wrong- their wars and murders, suicides and unstoppable sex, their patricide and eating of their cubs are all All-Right. I wish I could die by letting my million spider offspring explode from and then feast on my delicious, bulbous torso. Or I could die by having my ferocious mate bite off my puny head after sex- whatever, it’s natural, everybody’s doing it, it gives meaning to life, it’s a stitch in the tapestry of the universe woven by the Fates, it’s a poem, it’s destiny.

But I don’t feel like an animal (I can’t rape or kill or psychotically eat my young). I don’t feel like death is natural for me or for any person. Is that feeling itself wrong and unnatural? Maybe that’s part of why (in addition to our need to explain and find patterns) humans have an instinct for religion, every culture comes up with their own brand of afterlife- it’s our human nature to deny death. If you believe in an afterlife or in reincarnation, you can avoid the gut knowledge that death is DEATH. I wish I could do that, be like Henry Ford and the many people who’ve found solace in reincarnation or in heaven. Even if there’s a Zen meditation out there where you inhale the sickness and death of this world and exhale acceptance, if I tried it, I’d choke.* Maybe I’d vomit and burst into tears. It’d be gross.

I wasn’t specially nice to Mom when she was on her deathbed. When Dad had cancer I promised I’d be nicer to him going forward, but I am not at all. I guess impending death just doesn’t make me feel nicer even though I wish it did and it’s supposed to. I wish I could be the type of person who was nicer to someone after considering we’re both going to die, but I’m not. My only hope is to try to grow into a nicer person period who’d be really nice to her parents and everyone else even if we never had to die.

Sorry I’m not enlightened. Looking at everyone who’s accepted death and thinks it can be beautiful and dignified, and everyone else who doesn’t think about it and lives life never knowing death until they, well, die, I’m sorry death hurts and repulses me. I wish I were like the others, that I could ignore it or think of an afterlife, but even the idea that it’s all a plan makes me feel terrible. My mom didn’t die throwing herself in front of a bus of school children. (I wish she had. (It’s hard to die well. Many people don’t.)) She died and suffered for nothing, like an animal, and I don’t find any meaning in it.

I’m probably just abnormal but I don’t think life OR death is for humans what it is for animals. Animals are born, they look adorable as babies, they stay adorable after they’re grown or they become terrifying/ disgusting/ delicious, they may or may not learn some things, they do some work to get their food and shelter, they eat and sleep, they do some work so they can reproduce, they do some work to raise their offspring or they don’t, they interact with other creatures, objects, or places, and then they die. I can’t live my life like that. I can’t be like an animal- I can’t live like one or die like one.

It’s one thing to be stoic and mature about something inevitable. Like when some injustice occurs and someone stronger enslaves you or your legs are gone so you have robot legs or your whole family starved to death in China, you don’t let that ruin your life: you are courageous and heroic by going on to regain freedom or win the Olympics or become a scientist and say, “Shit happens- I was branded sub-human, my legs are gone, and I’m an orphan. There’s no point in dwelling on it so I have to have a good attitude going forward and be amazing.” That’s awesome. But don’t tell this person that the world is better that these injustices occurred, that their lives are more meaningful now because of suffering, that it was all supposed to happen so people could be inspired by their challenges. That stuff shouldn’t happen and we should try to stop it if we can. That’s how I feel about death, about all injustice, all suffering. If it has to happen, then I’m going to be brave about it. But I’m not going to say the world is more beautiful because of ugliness.

For millennia people had other people as slaves. Babies would die left and right. Women would die in childbirth. Sickness and disease would have no solution and people would accept it as part of life because what else are you supposed to do? How else do you cope with it? (Well, you can solve it.) (Death is the one disease everyone suffers under and everyone copes with.) People would rape and pillage their neighbors or expose their unwanted babies on the mountains, stuff animals do, but humans stopped doing this stuff because we’re better than the animals. We stopped coping with diseases because we can cure them.

That’s the gift that we humans have over the animals. We can choose to be better. If there’s a choice between good and evil, between hope and despair, between progress and complacency, we can choose the light. We can choose life.

 

 

 

* Margaret Cho wrote, “there’s this Buddhist meditation where you breathe in the world’s suffering and breathe out compassion and I try to do it and choke.”

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Any thoughts to offer a 24 yr old who feels that time is passing at an ever accelerating pace?

Answer by Nancy Hua:

I heard that the brain mainly records new events and your perception of time is based on the number of memories. This makes sense to me because I’m not likely to remember every time I go scuba diving but I’ll probably remember the first time. If I have no memory of last night it’ll feel like last night didn’t happen, like time skipped from yesterday to today, whereas if I stayed up all night talking with a new person it’ll feel like a really long day. This could explain the phenomena you’re describing and prescribe a solution.

When you’re a kid, everything is new, nothing has ever happened to you before (which is part of why kids are lured by strangers into cars, etc: they don’t know what’s normal). Thus your first summer at camp might feel like it’s lasted a million years- you feel yourself changing because your brain is experiencing and recording a lot of new events, meeting new people, and learning new ideas. The fraction of stuff that’s newly recorded in your brain is high, and you feel like time has passed slowly.

As our lives progress, the rate of learning and new experiences tends to slow. As you age and begin a career, you don’t learn new things as frequently. You’re gaining expertise and your community is not changing as much. Furthermore the probability of some event being new to your brain is lower- a monotonically increasing fraction of experiences will map to an existing memory. Because your brain doesn’t record as many new memories, time feels like it’s passing more quickly.

Maybe if you want to make time seem like it’s passing more slowly, you have to get your brain to form a lot of new connections. To do this, you can try to learn a lot of new things, go to new environments, and gain new experiences, which is going to be harder as time passes for obvious reasons, but should be getting easier as technology advances. The amount of information accessible to any person is always increasing, connections between people are always increasing, and travel frictions are constantly decreasing.

The model of getting good at one occupation and doing it repeatedly might make time seem to fly by unless you’re deliberate about it. You could deliberately choose to keep a level of failure in your work and life so that your’e always pushing yourself to become more of an expert and learning new things. Your brain will form new connections every time you go to a sufficiently different environment, so changing locations will make you feel like time is slower and that more stuff is happening to you because you’re forming new memories. Engaging with sufficiently different types of people will also stimulate you.

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What is Nancy Hua going to do next?

Someone asked What is Nancy Hua going to do next? on Quora and then people offered me credits to answer. Who can resist Quora credits? This question has been on my mind a lot. Whenever I dwell on something, it tends to degenerate to the terminal question, “What is the meaning of life?” How often do people think about this? Talking about my weird thoughts caused someone to tell me not to have a midlife crisis. I haven’t even said all the most outlandish things I think. But here’s another taste:

I don’t think I’ve achieved very much in life yet. Looking at people who’ve changed the world and helped so many others, relative to them I haven’t accomplished anything. However, I don’t feel like they’re fundamentally better than me because they’re not superhuman- they’re people just like us, and many of them were born in vastly inferior circumstances, often simply because the past sucks compared to the present. A person born in modern times can impact billions of people with a few years of work, which wasn’t true for anyone even 100 years ago. Newton’s knowledge of science and math is nothing compared to mine, and forget women born even a few decades before me. By virtue of birth, I understand the nature of reality better than Benjamin Franklin- isn’t that awesome? I don’t idealize any past golden age because it’s obvious that now is the best time to have been born. I’d rather be me, right now, than an 18th century king.

The suggestion that our species may have peaked 50 years ago is terrifying and sad. If anyone believed our species were degenerating, it’d be their top priority to try to reverse this trend. Wouldn’t it be tragic if our children looked back and wished they’d been born 100 years ago, or that things became so bad they would even prefer to have been born in Victorian England?

Similarly, there shouldn’t be a golden age of my life either- I want to always want to be what I am, to never look back and wish to be a previous version of myself. I think so far that trend has held- whenever I remember previous Nancy’s, their stupidity mortifies me and I feel thankful current Nancy is so superior in comparison, and I happily anticipate my future self dismantling my current self. I want to always feel that way, just as I always want to feel that human beings are getting better and better.

This trend of progress doesn’t arise without deliberate work. If many people hadn’t dedicated their lives to advancing our race, if Nelson Mandela hadn’t been courageous and self sacrificing, if Turing hadn’t been patriotic and determined, it’s quite possible that I wouldn’t feel blessed to have been born in this age, that our species could’ve peaked decades ago and all that would await us would be pollution and mutual annihilation. We must choose to continuously improve, both as a species and as individuals. When I think about what I want to work on, it’s with both humbleness and boldness. Why not reach for greatness? What do I have to lose- I haven’t achieved anything yet!

In general I’m looking for enormous growth. Our world has several areas offering exponential growth so there’s a lot to learn and consider. Due to my noncompete period, I can’t discuss work with non prospective partners, so ask me in 2013.

Current projects include
1) fundraising for PGSS, a nerd camp I attended in high school, http://pgssalumni.org,
2) blogging at http://nancyhua.com (this blog will probably exist until December),
3) writing screenplays,
4) trading my personal account (allowed iff I manually enter every trade),
5) researching startups.

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Push Past Pain To Pleasure

Although I sometimes make a comment that makes people think I’m hard hearted, like, “Oh, you don’t want kids? Great! More resources for my kids,” in reality I am a big softy. If you tell me an emotional story, I’ll probably cry, especially if your face morphs in a way that suggests pain. This is why 5 years ago when Hulu played some commercial about daily giving to poor kids, instead of muting the ad, I thought, “It’s not the kids’ fault they’re born in countries with no wifi and their parents keep having more and more kids. There but for the grace of God go I.” I looked through the website which showed brief profiles of hundreds of pathetic kids and chose about 10 that looked the most promising- one was deaf and some might have had minor health issues but they seemed like they could all go on to be high functioning members of society. Some even still had parents who were probably simply overwhelmed by an avalanche of random other worries. They varied in age from 4 to 17 and were from South America, Africa, and Asia. For the next few years, I gave about $20 a day to this program, ultimately giving thousands of dollars.

A few times a year, the charity would send me a bundle of handmade cards and photographs of my kids. These cards would say stuff varying from, “My favorite class is gym. I often baby-sit my 6 brothers and sisters,” to “My best class is maths where I got an 85%,” to “I was an orphan living in a police station until you gave me $2 a day. My favorite class is soccer.” As the cards accumulated holiday after holiday, I realized that this was a total waste of my money. There was no discernible progress occurring. I did not feel like I was making an impact. I didn’t feel the kids felt I was making an impact- they probably viewed their dutiful cards to me as some quarterly chore like filling out performance reviews for someone you knew was completely useless but was impossible to fire. Instead of feeling good about giving, I felt like this random cause was a laziness/guilt tax.

Thousands of dollars later, I eventually got around to canceling my sponsorship. Why was it that giving to this charity felt like a tax I was paying rather than a gift I was giving? Why didn’t I feel good about a great cause, a sponsorship I had initiated with only altruistic intentions? For a long time, I wondered if it was because I was just an ungenerous person who would rather spend thousands on the furniture-scratching cat at her side than on deserving human beings across the world. But I’m not ungenerous- I objectively donate a lot of money to various causes. Why was it that this charity made me feel nothing? Now I think I’m beginning to understand the answer.

Part of the answer is that I can’t give what cost me nothing. This money I was sending to these kids was nothing to me. I could easily afford $20 a day- I almost never bought groceries because most of my food came from my company where I spent 90% of my waking hours. The moment I gave them my bank information and this charity stopped being a deliberate decision, it became something that cost me nothing. When you choose which brand to buy at the store, you’re making a deliberate decision that costs you some brain cycles. You choose the organic, all natural cleaner because it’s better for the environment and in case your cat rolls around in it she won’t get poisoned licking herself clean. I feel good about this action, the extra thought and effort I put into it, and this extra cost to my autopilot shopping experience matters more to me than the cost to my wallet. I don’t value something if it costs me nothing, and if I never have to think about it, then it costs me nothing.

The main project that has been costing me time lately has been fund-raising for PGSS, a nerd camp I attended in high school that went defunct in 2008 when Pennsylvania lost all its money due to financial chaos caused by evil high frequency traders.

When Joel first told me about this program, he said, “I LOVED it.”
“Did you have sex?”
“…Everything but.”
“Wow!”
“It’s great for other reasons too- when you drive up to the dorm the TA’s all greet you by name: they’ve memorized all the faces off the face book” (this was a pre-Facebook use of the term face book). Joel went on to describe how the classes were actually really hard, how the team projects were real work, how the other kids were awesome, how you get an Erdos number of 2 (or 3?) if you work on the math team project with that one ancient professor. The best part was this program was totally free! What would normally cost >$4000 per student was all free. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to CTY the summer I’d wanted to go- my dad said he was always sorry about that. I had subsidized meals from school and we were pathetically poor compared to my suburban peers. Most of Pennsylvania is not hugely rich. Outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has lots of rural areas where kids don’t get to take AP classes or spend a few grand on a summer program, which meant we would be behind other kids when it came to applying to colleges, which was the ultimate goal we had been toiling towards for 12 years. PGSS was selective- it took 60-90 kids across the different districts in Pennsylvania, most of them the top kid in their high school, and brought them all together for a great summer.

Part of me had wondered if, when I left Pittsburgh, no one from Pennsylvania would hold a candle to the new people I’d meet at MIT, but that didn’t happen: apparently human intelligence is not distributed like that. The smartest people I know from Pennsylvania are still the smartest people I know, and most of them went to PGSS. Whenever I go to a party with a lot of high powered, super educated people, I run into someone from PGSS. This nerd camp is how I know all the smartest people from Pennsylvania! Well, all the ones who were high school juniors before 2008.

When I first heard about the Pennsylvania Governor’s Schools being shut down, I thought it was such a waste. I donated my $4K, the cost of sending 1 student to PGSS, figured I’d done my part, and then sat back. After not even getting any acknowledgment of my donation, I was mad and wondering how incompetent the people running this revival were. Who doesn’t even send a thank you note? And $4K is nothing to sneeze at! After all, I’m only a few years out of college. There are people who’ve been out of this program for 20 years and are richer than me! Why am I the one donating $4K when some 46 year old should be spearheading the effort with $30K or something? What’s the point of a program where 80% of the kids who go to PGSS go on to MIT, Stanford, CMU, Caltech, and Ivies, where half the people have Ph.D.’s and/or M.D.’s and/or J.D.’s (some of them all 3 degrees), and they can’t even raise enough money to get the program back? I only have 2 B.S.’s and both are completely useless! Are these brain surgeons and rocket scientists and patent lawyers too busy floating on their yachts to cut a check?

I forgot about Save PGSS and went on to donate to MIT and some other charities (a charity event is how I got this photo with Mr. Damon- he begged to be photographed with me, a real MIT Good Will Hunting genius, and I can never reject my fans). Then a few weeks ago when I was in California, there was word of a SF PGSS reunion. I brought tim rogers to pose as a 17 year old math prodigy and intended to shake hands with a few tech founders with one hand while stuffing cherry tomatoes into my mouth with my other hand before zipping away in my rented Nissan GTR, the front of which bottomed out even easier than the Tesla roadster. I couldn’t drive in the city with that thing without repeatedly asking tim if he was sure there weren’t really steep hills en route that would require my swerving into the other lane to avoid scraping the bottom of the car against the road.

At this reunion, I learned that the PGSS revival effort was basically Jeremy, a few alums, and his mom tracking down all the alumni and doing a million annoying tasks. I felt so humbled by how much Jeremy’s mom was doing for this program, a program that I had benefited from. I thought about all the ways PGSS has benefited me. For one thing, it was a great thing to put on my college application. In fact, my team project was mentioned in the application notes (everyone my year got to view their admissions notes).

I made friends that are still my best friends, people whose judgment I trusted. I think it was one of my first real confirmations that me and my dad weren’t the smartest people on Earth (thankfully one of many such confirmations). I mean, I had suspected we weren’t the smartest people who ever existed since we had, like, cars and computers and other technologies that I wouldn’t have come up with, and plus there were all these otherwise inexplicable books. But there was almost no one whose judgment I actually trusted. It was such a relief to make friends who you knew you could rely on, and to realize that you weren’t the smartest person on Earth, otherwise you’d be the one that would have to advance civilization (trust me, you don’t want to rely on me for this).

And everyone was really nice! Sometimes high school kids are mean, but every single person at PGSS was really nice to everyone else. After just one summer together, I became closer to these people than people I’d seen every day for years during high school. mitri has helped me move into every place I’ve lived since college. I’ve spent weeks at Tony’s lake house and he journeyed all the way to the Village from the Upper East Side to cut my cat’s nails. Ray let me drive his Miata even though it became clear that my understanding of manual transmission was more theoretical than practical and more nonexistent than theoretical. It’s not like PGSS happened for a summer and then was over. It touched the rest of my life. I’m still friends with these people and so proud we’re all getting more and more awesome as time passes. Everyone is either in the upper echelons of academia, working at a top company, starting their own companies- is there any other high school summer alumni base that can claim this level of achievement? I feel so proud to number among these illustrious ranks!

After hearing about Jeremy’s experiences, I said I wanted to help and added this page to his PGSS Alumni website to start thanking supporters. I want to donate a lot to the revival of this program.

Because I realized the way giving feels good to me is if I can push through the indifference zone, then through the pain zone, all the way through to the pleasure zone on the other side. After a bunch of charity events and decisions regarding allocating my wealth, I learned this about charity: if I’m in the indifference zone and it costs me nothing to donate, then it’s a waste of my money because it’ll be a laziness/guilt tax rather than a joyful gift. If I’m in the pain zone and regretting having given this much money, then it’s a waste of money because I won’t give again- I just don’t care about the program enough to have it be worth that much money to me. If I can get past the pain zone and still want to donate money, then that’s when I know I really care about the program. That’s when donating feels really good. PGSS allows top students learn and work on science projects together for free, selected on merit, regardless of socioeconomic background. What’s more inspiring than that?

I also realized that if I’m donating money to MIT, which I paid for, then it doesn’t make sense for me not to donate to PGSS, which was absolutely free. PGSS is one of the things that has touched my life in a big way- I can’t imagine life without the friends I made there. And life isn’t about what you get, life is about what you give! What’s the point of anything any of us are doing if we’re not giving back to the world?

I pledge to match up to $20K any pledges that come as a result of people reading this blog. Go here to pledge or email me or leave a comment. Your pledge will not be collected unless we raise enough to restart the program and you can make it conditional on random things like if enough other engineers/CEOs/doctors/people from your city also pledge as much as you pledge. Big donors will have honors showered upon them! For the first person to pledge more than $1K, I will blog about your greatness or topic of your choice, the only topic of censure being something too sensitive to high frequency trading strategies, although I may consider it for outstanding donations. Imagine- you could be getting investment advice from me! That’s easily worth billions.