2017 in review (a quantified life)

I have always found it useful to take advantage of the New Year and reflect on what I have done over the past year. The day itself is a useful bookmark in life, inevitably trapped between leaving town for Christmas and coming back to town after the New Year begins. Because of the enforced downtime, what I happen to read has a strong influence on me – last year, I hopped on the Marie Kondo craze and really did manage to do a better job of keeping clean (kind of) but more importantly organizing my clothes by rolling and folding them until the fit so perfectly in my drawers. So that was useful, I guess.

The last year has been okay. Not great, not terrible. Kind of middle-of-the-road as my life goes. There have been some big wins (organizing a fantastic workshop at Cosyne on neurobehavioral analysis and being awarded a Simons Foundation fellowship that lets me join a fantastic group of scientists) and some frustrations (mostly scientific work that goes slowly slowly slowly).

One thing that sticks out for me over this past year – over these past two years, actually – is how little time I have spent on this blog. Or rather, how little of what I have done has been published on this blog. It’s not for a lack of time! I have actually done a fair bit of writing but am constantly stuck after a paragraph or two, my motivation waning until it disappears completely. This largely due to how I responded to some structural features in my life, mostly a long commute and a lot of things that I want to accomplish.

Last year I had the “clever” idea of creating a strict regimen of hour by hour and daily goals both for work and for my life. Do this analysis from 3pm – 4pm. Debug that code from 4pm – 5pm. Play the piano from 8pm – 9pm. Things like that. Maybe this works for other people? But I end up overambitious, constantly adding things that I need to do today so much that I rapidly switch from project to project, each slot mangled into nonsense by the little new things that will always spring up on any given day. Micromanaging yourself is the worst kind of managing, especially when you don’t realize you are doing it.

This is where what I read over winter break made me think. One of the three articles that influenced me was about the nature of work:

For unlike someone devoted to the life of contemplation, a total worker takes herself to be primordially an agent standing before the world, which is construed as an endless set of tasks extending into the indeterminate future. Following this taskification of the world, she sees time as a scarce resource to be used prudently, is always concerned with what is to be done, and is often anxious both about whether this is the right thing to do now and about there always being more to do. Crucially, the attitude of the total worker is not grasped best in cases of overwork, but rather in the everyday way in which he is single-mindedly focused on tasks to be completed, with productivity, effectiveness and efficiency to be enhanced. How? Through the modes of effective planning, skilful prioritising and timely delegation. The total worker, in brief, is a figure of ceaseless, tensed, busied activity: a figure, whose main affliction is a deep existential restlessness fixated on producing the useful.

Yup, that pretty much sums up how I was trying to organize my life. In the hope of accomplishing more I ended up doing less. This year I am trying a less-is-more approach; have fewer, more achievable goals each day/month/time unit; have more unstructured time; read more widely; and so on. Instead of saying I need to learn piano and I need to make art and I need to play with arduinos and I need to memorize more poetry and finding more and more things that I need to do, just list some things I’m interested in doing. Look at that list every so often to remind myself and then allow myself to flow into the things I am most interested in rather than forcing it.

I was lucky enough in graduate school to join a lunch with Eve Marder. There are two types of scientists, she said. Starters and finishers. Some people start a lot of projects, some people finish a few. This has always stuck with me. This past year I have been trying to maximize how many things I can work on – and it turns out that is a lot of different things – I want to spend this year doing a couple things at a time and finish them. Do them well.

I have this memory of Wittgenstein declaring in the Tractatus that “the purpose of the Philosopher is to clarify.” I must have confabulated that quote because I could never find it again. Still, it’s my favorite thing that Wittgenstein ever said. For a scientist, the aphorism should be that “the purpose of the Scientist is to simplify.”

There was an article in the New York Times recently from an 88-year-old man looking back on the 18 years he has lived in the millennium:

I’m trying to break other habits in far more conventional ways. As in many long marriages, my wife and I enjoy spending time with the same friends, watch the same television programs, favor the same restaurants, schedule vacations to many of the same places, avoid activities that venture too far from the familiar.

We decided to become more adventurous, shedding some of those habits. European friends of ours always seem to find the time for an afternoon coffee or glass of wine, something we never did. Now, spontaneously, one of us will suggest going to a coffee shop or cafe just to talk, and we do. It’s hardly a lifestyle revolution, but it does encourage us to examine everything we do automatically, and brings some freshness to a marriage that started when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president.

The best memories can come from unexpected experiences. The best thoughts can come from exposure to unexpected ideas. Attempting to radically organize my life has left me without those little moments where my mind wanders from topic to topic. Efficiency. I have cut back on my reading for pleasure, most of which now comes on audiobook during my commute and somehow seems to prevent deep thinking. But the reason I am interested in science in the first place is because of the questions about who we are and how we behave that come out of thinking about the things I read! The solution, again, is to remove some of the structure I am imposing on my life, simplify and force myself to let go of the need to always be doing something quantifiable and useful.

Looping back, this is where the importance of sitting down and writing, and finishing writing, is one of my big goals for the year. Because I find writing fun! And I find it the best way to really think rigorously, to explore new thoughts and new ideas. There is much less of a need to do so much, to try so many projects when I can read and think about something, writing about it to make something useful and enjoyable instead of making a huge product out of it.

I am not a Stoic but find Stoic thinking useful. Something I read over the holidays:

Let me then introduce you to three fundamental ideas of Stoicism – one theoretical, the other two practical – to explain why I’ve become what I call a secular Stoic. To begin with, the Stoics – a school of philosophers who flourished in the Greek and Roman worlds for several hundred years from the third century BCE – thought that, in order to figure out how to live our lives (what they called ethics), we need to study two other topics: physics and logic. “Physics” meant an understanding of the world, as best as human beings can grasp it, which is done by way of all the natural sciences as well as by metaphysics.

The reason that physics is considered so important is that attempting to live while adopting grossly incorrect notions about how the world works is a recipe for disaster. “Logic” meant not only formal reasoning, but also what we would today call cognitive science: if we don’t know how to use our mind correctly, including an awareness of its pitfalls, then we are not going to be in a position to live a good life.

Beyond reading and self-reflection, the best way to understand your life is to quantify it. Quantification is the best way to peer into the past and really cut through hazy memories that are full of holes. What did I really do? What did I really think? This isn’t an attempt at stricture or rigidity: it’s an attempt at radical self-knowledge. I’m a fairly active at journaling, which is the first step, but I also keep track of what I eat and how I exercise using MyFitnessPal, books I read on Goodreads, movies I watch on letterboxd, where I have been using my phone to track me, and science articles I read using Evernote (I used to be very active on yelp but somehow lost track of that). Using these tools to look back on the past year is a great experience: “Oh yeah, I loved that movie!” or “Ugh I can’t believe I read that whole book.” or just reminding myself of pleasant memories from a short trip to LA.

I’d like to expand that this year to include some other relevant data – ‘skills’ I work on like playing piano to see whether I’m actually improving, TV I watch (because maybe I watch too much, or not enough!), what music I’m listening to, where I spend my money (I already avidly keep track of the fluctuations in how much I have month-to-month), and what important experiences I have (vacations; hikes; seeing exciting new art). There don’t seem to be any good apps for these things outside of Mint, so I have assembled a giant Google Sheet for all of these categories to make it easier to access and analyze the data, with a main Sheet that I can use every month to look back and make some qualitative observations. Oh, and I’m also building a bunch of arduinos that can sense temperature, humidity, light, and sound intensity to put in different rooms of my house to log those things (mostly because my house is always either too hot or too cold and the thermostat is meaningless and I want to figure out why, and partly because I want to make sweet visualizations of the activity in my house throughout the year).

So my lists!

These are the movies I watched in 2017 and to which I gave 5 stars (no particular order):

Embrace of the Serpent
American Honey
Victoria
Gentleman’s Agreement
T2: Trainspotting
Logan
Moana
While We’re Young
Moonlight

With honorable mentions to My Life As A Zucchini, Blade Runner 2049, and Singles.

These are the books I read in 2017 and liked the most:

The Invisibility Cloak (Ge Fei)
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Murakami)
Ficciones (Borges)
The Stars Are Legion (Hurley)
Redshirts (Scalzi)
Red Mars (Robinson)
We Are Legion (Taylor)
Permutation City (Egan)
Neuromancer (Gibson)

I see a lot more scifi than I normally read, and many books that I have read previously.

Where was I (generated using this)?

There was an article a few years ago on the predictability of human movement. It turns out that people are pretty predictable! If you know where they are at one moment, you can guess where they will be the next. That’s not too surprising, though, is it? You’re mostly at work or at home. If you go to a bar, there is a higher than random probability that you’ll go home afterward.

The data that you can ask your Android phone to collect on you is unfortunately a bit impoverished. It doesn’t log everything you do but is biased toward times when you check your phone (lunch, when you’re the passenger in a long car ride home, etc). Still, it captures the broad features of the day.

I’ve been keeping track of the data for two years now so I downloaded the data and did a quick analysis about the entropy of my own life. How predictable is my location? If you bin the data into 1 sq. mile bins, entropy is a measure of how much uncertainty there is in where I was. 1 bit of entropy would mean you could guess where I was down to the mile with only one yes or no question; 2 bits of entropy would mean you could guess with two questions; and so on.

On any given day of the week, there are roughly 3 bits of entropy in my location (much less on weekends). But as you can see, it varies a lot by month depending on whether I am traveling or not.

In 2016 (the weird first month is because that’s when I started collecting data and only got a few days):