Clif Bars Arrived and Determinism

11:11 AM

I am not sure what I am doing with my life right now. I fell asleep at 12 AM last night, I woke up this morning at around 7 AM, and I had plenty of time to do anything I wanted. There were some things still on my to do list, although not written down, lie in the back on my mind to work on. Those were activities such as walking 10k steps today, catching up on logs today, and even catching up on finances today. You know what though? I started watching some YouTube videos and I felt way too lazy to do anything else.

Sure messing up is a trap, but YouTube is a trap as well. I think YouTube has so many hours of entertainment, an endless amount of entertainment, that I could spend all my time on it without noticing. At around 9:30 AM, this is after more than a couple of hours of watching senseless videos, because I've basically seen it all at this point, I stopped YouTube and picked up a book from my bookshelf. It was A Brief History of the Time by Stephen Hawking. I have a bunch of books on my bookshelf I have not read. I have tons of "classic" books such as this, that I would agree would be amazing to read, but I just haven't put any time into doing so.

Anyway I read about 11 pages of the book before I felt bored and put it back in the shelf. Still, it was a start. The book started off with how the ancient Greeks viewed the universe and how they came to the conclusions that they did (that the earth was round, how they estimated the circumference of the earth, etc). The book advanced to more modern scientists in the 1600s that toppled the old view of the Greeks who viewed the earth as the center. I got to the part to just before Einstein yet again altered our model of the universe, and after that I skimmed the rest of the book, rapidly flipping pages and reading some brief parts. It got very complicated in the center, with lots of modern physics theories and very advanced models.

There is so much crazy math and science involved when it comes to modeling the universe that it overwhelmed me. One was Penrose's model of the universe which I skimmed over. It's basically a theory that the big bang of one universe is enclosed by some other universe, or something like that, and that the pattern is shaped like funnels stacked on each other. What overwhelmed me is a picture of Penrose in front of some blackboard with the chalk model of his universe being drawn out, lots of symbols and 3d universe shapes like a universe donut inside another universe donut, and a big universe funnel in the middle, with lots of arrows drawn on those models, I guess to simulate rotation or direction? Surrounding this model was a bunch of math and physics equations explaining how this model works and how the math backs it. Anyway that image just blew my mind. I can't even begin to understand how complex that is.

Anyway after that I started reading the book The Edge which was a sports book with lots of quotes about people who did well in sports. It is basically a motivational quotations book from the 1980s with lots of quotes from athletes and other successful people. Reading some quotes on there made me come on here and start writing. I've just been going on a stream of consciousness, though not really. I've been writing about my day, not really that stream of consciousness-y. These people were fired up though, and they trained and worked hard ever day. I googled some of the names of people who had a quote in the book, and they lived successful lives. All of the people I searched were either retired or dead, but they had their own impact in the world.

Oh yeah, I forgot to write about it yesterday, but my new sim card arrived. I installed it on my other phone and it's now working, I can make phone calls and text messages again. However all my contacts and other data are with the other phone, so that's still gone. Also I wanted to walk outside today while listening to some audio, but this phone doesn't have any audio sockets, so I can't plug my headphones into these.

Anyway what am I doing with my life? I do have my current tasks list like I mentioned earlier such as catching up on logs, finances, and walking 10k steps. At the same time there's school related things I have due, such as homework for this week and the final exam next week. I also have to study for some personal thing, and that's that. There's no shortage of things for me to work on, and yet why am I not working on those things? I dunno, I feel really bored and I feel like I have all the time in the world to work on those tasks.

If I were to estimate how long it would take for me to complete each task I'm wanting to do today, I think catching up on logs would take 2 hours, catching up on finances would take about 1.5 hours, and walking 10k steps would take 2 hours. So, if I wanted to do all those things, I would need about 6 hours, and yet I'm here procrastinating because intuitively I'm thinking I could do it all in 2 hours total, which shouldn't be possible. The reason I'm procrastinating is because I'm thinking I could just wait until 9 PM, and then complete everything, but in reality that's not going to happen. If I end up walking at 9 PM, I'd get back home at 11, and then I would be too tired to work on the other tasks.

Anyway it shouldn't be hard to work on my logs at least, so I'm just going to catch up on that now if possible. Let's try this...

11:59 PM

Okay so I created a project called Saturday, August 8th 2020, and added those three tasks that I want to do today. Now I'm going to start. I'm going to work on logs first, let's see how I do.

1:28 PM

I did it. I caught up on all my logs. I thought it was going to take me 2 hours, but it only took me an hour and 30 minutes, not bad!

Near the beginning of working on those logs, a friend texted me. Of course when the text came in, since I didn't have anyone's contact info on this "new" phone, it was just from a random number I didn't recognize. The text asked me how I was doing, I thought I knew who it was, maybe it was someone I was texting right before my phone died and maybe he texted me and I didn't reply to him during that entire duration. I asked who it was, and it was someone I didn't expect. Someone I hadn't come in contact with for like a year. He would message me every now and then but I deliberately ignored him since he kept asking for so many favors all the time, he owes me like $1400 or something like that.

predicted and

Anyway we texted back and forth for a bit, I told him that nothing has really changed with me. I'm at the same job, doing the same thing as last year. So, not much has changed. He told me he was still looking for a job, but when I asked him how his search was going, he stopped replying. The way he worded his introduction, and from the rest of our conversation, just seemed to me like he was hoping I was in the same situation as he was, so we would be able to connect in misery. He wanted me to give him some bad news about my own life, because he likes to dwell on negativity a lot, always the victim in this or that.

I understand as well, having other friends that are also looking for work, that the job market is tough today. Very tough. So when I asked him how he was doing at his own job search, he just stopped replying because he didn't want to say how bad it was. Just knowing him, he will probably be asking me for favors regarding job searches or something.

Anyway the next thing for me to work on is finances, but I'm going to take a break first and come back to that after.

7:30 AM (of Sunday, August 9th 2020)

What happened afterwards is I went to reply to some comments on YouTube and that took like 40 minutes. I think that's a total waste of time. After that the 204 Clif Bars that I ordered arrived, pictured. Pretty cool. I made a video recording all the different Clif Bars, and it took me about 20 minutes to assemble them all into that grid shape. There was also someone that came by to fix the kitchen light, and he took a look at the light in my room as well.

After that I joined up some YouTube streamer and chat with the people in there for a bit. It's possible I helped save someone's life today who got Covid-19. I heard from other people that this guy was a regular in the chat, and this was his second time getting Covid and that he may actually die. I encouraged him to live on and he thanked me a bunch of times, so I like to think it may have helped him.

Someone in the chat talked about determinism and recommended a determinism series. Basically that's what I ended up watching the entire night. In the middle of watching I took a break and ended up messing up again. I think I am addicted to messing up, and I should stop. It takes about 1 day for me to recover after messing up. I still haven't lasted a week yet without messing up, all year.

Anyway I think determinism is a pretty neat idea, that there are no random events and everything had a previous cause. Even something such as a coin flip or dice roll can be determined once all the variables are known, and it's not truly random. Even "random number generators" aren't random, they always take some external references such as the current date/time, CPU temperature, memory usage, etc. to come up with a "random" number, but again once all those are known it's no longer random. Take that down into the individual synapse level of humans, and even our actions can be determined to react a certain way to external events.

In a way, everything we think about had to precede with other thoughts we previously had or life events we previously experienced. Based on that, everything is predetermined. In a way, our life is like a coin flip in mid flip, it's hard to determine how many more flips the coin will go through at how fast a rate, and it's hard to determine what it will land on, but given all the known variables about the coin and its environment, the end result and all the events prior to the end result can be simulated and is therefore known. However, to perfectly simulate a coin flip, you must first invent the universe.

It could be that if there isn't a planet near us, like let's say Mars was not there, that the coin flip could behave completely differently from prediction 1 out of 99999999 times. That 1 difference is enough to mess up perfect simulations, so everything has to be the same. I think to perfectly simulate the universe, you would start with everything needed in the initial state of the universe and all its variables perfectly correct, like a coin getting ready to be flipped, and then every event can be simulated and is therefore known. In that way, determinism states that our entire lives and everything else in the universe is a known event and has basically already occurred.

So anyway, I ended up watching that determinism series and fell asleep near the end of one episode, because I messed up a few hours beforehand. Messing up causes a lot of fatigue afterwards. Sometimes it doesn't, but most of the time it does. There's definitely less energy after messing up. I think that means something, and I should definitely stop messing up if I want optimal energy and concentration, but I am addicted. I've not been addicted to anything else as much as messing up. I think I've given up every addiction, except messing up.