Whatever I Was Doing in 2020, I Should Do Again

Day 22 of Inkhaven: 30 Days of Posts

A data-driven analysis of 567 journal entries.

Going over some old journal entries revealed loads of interesting data.

Feb 24, 2022:

For a long time I played video games, or distracted myself on the internet instead of pursuing things which I felt I really needed to be doing. Currently I feel very little attachment to doing that, since my last 10 day vipassana sitting which was on the 5th of Jan 2022. It feels easy to slip into doing stuff I would previously have seen as work, but which now feels like play.

It does feel like there's a true causal role in the practices, from the reading, meditation, exercise, journaling, and my actual happiness. And choosing to be happy is a genuine and critical thing to optimise for. I think my work and relationships benefitted hugely from this.

2020 was a shockingly good year for me.

I have been keeping up a morning pages habit since some time in 2020, and it's been a really interesting thing to reflect on. I haven't always kept up with it, but I have about 567 entries over the 6 year period.

I used Claude Sonnet 4.6 to score a few different qualities in the writing over the 6 year period, and created this fun graph. And also did a bunch of analysis on the content.

Some stuff that jumps out: it's super bleak that I didn't journal at all for 2023. I was working as an ML engineer at the time, and I think I kind of felt like I didn't control my destiny during that period, so the journaling didn't really matter. It was honestly kind of weird. During the other periods I was in some kind of interesting semi-exploratory phase where a lot of creativity was required, and so the journaling felt natural.

The biggest question from the data is what was happening in mid 2020 that led to such high scores? The scores all reached their peak in that time and never really came close again. During this period in lockdown I was staying with my mom and brother in Johannesburg. I remember the time as one filled with feelings of aspiration, extreme commitment to discipline, and love and appreciation for everything around me.

Here are some choice quotes from the time period.

The ayahuasca entry (2020-06-07)

Reflecting on an Ayahuasca journey I did the day before with my brother:

I had a direct and powerful encounter with my own subconscious, represented by thousands of tendrils inside of a gigantic sphere, moving backward and forward like kelp in the ocean. It was a profoundly plant-like being, and I realised that the more fundamental aspects of myself are much more like a collection of plants than any kind of "human" self.

Then I spent time thinking of the Buddha and the power of letting go. Every time I would breathe out and release all this tension from my whole system. I would feel overwhelmed with gratitude to the Buddha. I was struck with an image of the buddha plucking the answer to enlightenment and how simple it must have been in that moment. The answer is just a release from all the bindings that hold us. Complete liberation.

Despite it being lockdown, there was a huge sense of liberation in the posts. A feeling of choosing the right thing for myself, over and over again. Most importantly, there was a feeling of worthiness and love in the pages that is extremely moving to me.

The cat (2020-06-24)

Reading about how much I loved my cat back then makes me think that I am really doing myself a disservice not forcing myself to stay somewhere and just living with a cat.

Taz is now sat before me, beautiful hair illuminated in the morning light. Special clean boy. Strange and wonderful how he chooses me day after day like this. Certainly it is no coincidence. My approach to him has also shifted to one of appreciation and nurture.

Look at the head of this beautiful cat. With his tiny little tufts of hair on the ends of his ears. The soft downy fur behind his ears. His puffy little cheeks and serene, impenetrable expression. The dark stripes leading away from his eyes reminiscent of his predatory ancestry. A more subtle feature hidden from the eye is the smoky scent that occupies the slope of his neck. Sometimes nutty, sometimes smoky. It seems to be a natural byproduct of his living.

I also seemed to be a lot more positive about building AGI than working on AI safety back then, but the descriptions still go pretty hard:

Ambition posting (2020-06-14)

I have that burning desire in me. It burns bright and hot indeed. That is the object of my life's desire. These wounds on my hands really excite me for some reason. I want to have hands marked by the efforts of my labour. I want to be pulling the logs to carry the blocks of the pyramid that is the final invention of humankind. The ultimate structure of order and intelligence, a burning edifice to the heavens, conquering the mechanisms of problem solving itself.

This is a useful reminder that I didn't just think of working on AI safety myself, I actually wanted to work on capabilities at the time. It was only later that safety crystallised in my mind as the more important thing to pursue, because so few people were working on it.

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The general impression from the posts was a remarkable sense of awe and wonder, and appreciation for the very experience of living. I think this was all mostly brought on by the practices I was doing each day. The morning would start, I'd meditate for an hour, then do a bunch of calisthenics exercises or go for a walk in the park with my mom and brother, then journal for 750 words, have breakfast with my mom, and then work for hours upskilling in AI.

Importantly I was meditating for 2 hours a day during this period as part of my Vipassana practice. It was incredibly intense, but also instrumental to creating the right mental conditions to the whole situation.

My future journal entries reflect this, every time I'd collapse into really bad states I'd start clutching for the practice again. Eventually I started putting off going more and more. Claude had some firm words to say to me about this.

It is true that I didn't go.

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It seems worth trying that experiment again, and seeing whether the happiness strategy I developed actually translates into producing the results that I seem set on choosing today. More importantly, it made it all feel like play, rather than a grind.