wasting time

18294 days. Days theoretically left for me to live. And on occasion I still find myself wasting time. Life is so precious and yet I cannot help myself. I need to change my environment even more in order to create a kind of life that I would find valuable.

But the problem then goes back what does it mean for life to be valuable, a fulfilled life. It cannot be just about being happy. That seems too ridiculous. Long term happy? What difference does it make? If I were to live a short life with happiness versus a long life with sadness and some happiness then I would have experienced same amount of happiness. Is sadness a necessity? I am not sure. Sometimes this sadness can be too overwhelming. To get some genuine happiness for this sadness doesn't seem to be worth it.

It's pathetic that these musings are coming from someone who in the big picture is a fairly lucky person and well off. There are people who don't even know that when they wake up tomorrow will they get a chance to eat something. I cannot waste my time like this.

Source of suffering

The source of all the suffering is desire. But once you kill your desires, what do you have left. Maybe a little bit of peace. Not all desires are equal. Some are more meaningful than others. Although all of them do cause suffering.

Radiolab sleep

Why do we dream? Apparently our brains labels certain problems as being hard by virtue of attaching certain emotions to them and then decides to work on it during dreams. It tries to solve problems by free associating the concepts and if there are any solutions to the problems in our past. I wonder if the sense of consciousness that exists during that moment is the same as one we having while awake. Is it a different kind of consciousness?

The function of sleep is to break connections that we have made while we were awake so that we remember better. This is possible because during sleep, a current of electrical activity begins from the back of the brain and washes over all of neurons during sleep. It starts pruning various connections just like a gardener prunes the lawn. The result is that even though there were lots of activities being represented in our brain for the previous day, pruning this information lowers the volume on all the activities and makes them more bearable. There was information on what you ate, where you were driving, what you were trying to learn etc. By reducing information on all of these activities, only activities that were most important to you; activities with emotional connotation get labeled as important, will stand out. Thus, information that you were trying to learn will stand out more.

Radiolab memory

Memory is not like a cubboard. It is malleable. In fact, every time we retrieve a memory, we reconstruct it. So memories that are rarely remembered are the ones that are most accurate. The function of consciousness is partly not just to order information, but to reconstruct it while it is being retrieved.

Making it a homepage

Let's see if there is an increase in how many posts I make if the blog is in front of me as a constant reminder. Hopefully it should go up