What you return to

This post can also be found on my personal website,

Hokusai returned to this motif throughout his life, finally nailing it at 72

From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own — Hokusai, one year before his death at 89

“I’m just peeling mushrooms for the lamb de tournelles”

“Peeling mushrooms?”*

“Yeah. It’s just a nice little fun detail. So when the diners see it, they’ll know that someone spent a lot of time on their dish”

— The Bear, S2E7 “Forks”

I allowed myself to have an Intellectual Hoe Phase this year. I did a brief stint in a band, I didn’t do an internship in summer to teach myself hardware design, my CS + Cogsci ass took classes in physics and sociology and rhetoric and philosophy and more. The question I wanted to answer was- what are the things I really want to do, and how do I stick to them? AKA the perennial question of who am I?

But as the year ended, I found myself returning to the same things again. I realized that every single time I’ve tried to force myself into being someone I wasn’t, I’ve snapped back into my true nature. Every time I’ve been given advice, I’ve only learnt to follow it on my own schedule. It’s like I was meant to learn it at a certain time, and any earlier wouldn’t have worked.

This concept of return ballooned in my head until I noticed it was a common thread through almost everything I learnt, classes or otherwise. Through rhetoric and computer architecture and character and cybernetics and Popper and Nietzsche and Buddhism and growing up and dedication and love.

I feel like I can’t unsee it anymore, and so I want to talk about the concept of return. How what we return to defines us, our character, and the people we love. How we can’t help but return to things, and how to return to them better. How it tells us who we are and where we’re going.

The people you love are the people you return to

What is loving someone but knowing you’ll return to them? What are friends but people you return to in both times of struggle and celebration? What is family but the people you know you’ll return to no matter what?

This one goes both directions. You return to people because you love them. But you also love people you repeatedly return to. An almost guaranteed way to make friends is to put yourselves in places where you’ll have to repeatedly spend time with each other without conscious planning, which is why (I’m assuming) people complain it’s harder to make friends as an adult outside work- you just aren’t forced to be in places anymore.

I’ve noticed the relationships people have return to the same patterns. It’s often the anxious avoidant cycle, a constant push and pull, breakups followed by reconciliations, extreme highs and lows. It can be the same drama played across every person in their life, a victim complex or maybe narcissism. It can be positive too- the people who seem to make friends and bring joy to just about everyone they meet. It’s never exactly the same, but the patterns always feel like successive lines of a poem with a consistent rhyme scheme.

You even return to the same people in any given set of time. Maybe it’s just the circumstances of your life that forces those interactions to happen. But you return to the same group of friends in school, and then maybe, years later after no communication, you return to the friendships as if no time had passed. This can be a good or a bad thing. You can be forced to repeatedly interact with people who are unhealthy and make your life more stressful. On the other hand, returning to the right relationships is what makes them blossom.

The people you return to is influenced by an even deeper thing- your character.

Your character is the thoughts and actions you return to

It’s easy to think we’re infinitely malleable, but the truth is, we return to the same thoughts and actions again and again. Don’t we all have that friend who’s had the same problems forever? Don’t we all secretly know that we, too, have that one annoying issue that hasn’t seemed to escape us for ages?

In my ancient rhetoric class, it felt like the Ancient Greeks thought character was something fundamental and unchanging. I spent a gap semester teaching kids, and last semester I took an education class where we taught at a school for refugees in Oakland. And both gave me the sense that the Greeks were on to something. Even when they were as young as 6, I could tell that each child was wired completely differently. They each had a unique set of actions and thoughts they seemed to return to.

There’s plausible explanations for the idea that our character is set. Twin studies show that we might be controlled a lot more by our genetics than we’d like to think. IQ is largely heritable. And the way I see it, our thoughts are like a river carving out a canyon- the more we think a certain way, the more we entrench ourselves in that manner of thought.

Because of this, I don’t think people change, they just become more extreme versions of themselves. Destiny is just the sum of our predispositions nudging us in a certain direction. I’m finally old enough to see this firsthand. I met a friend from a school I left in 8th grade, and it seemed like everyone I asked about had become more extreme versions of themselves. The nice people became nicer, the inflammatory ones more inflammatory. I guess because we return to the same thoughts and actions over time, it forms a powerful feedback loop that nudges us towards a heightened version of our character.

This also means trying to change yourself or someone else doesn’t work, but I do think we can guide whether we express the positive or negative manifestations of our character. Sometimes, the characteristics you hate about yourself just aren’t in the right environment to flourish.

• The overly aesthetically oriented person might suffer from worrying too much about their own appearance, but flourish when they focus that on, say, curation. But a naive mistake would be to try and stop caring so much about looks and beauty. This likely won’t ever succeed.

• I noticed my distractibility was in fact curiosity, and when it’s directed on things I actually care about, it’s hyperfocus! The smart thing would be to work on things I actually care about, even if there’s many of them. The dumb thing to do would be to say ‘hey, I need to stop being so curious about things and force myself to only think about one subject’. This has always felt like chopping off parts of myself, and would work only with violence and self-coercion.

We can’t cut off who we are. But we can guide it better. And how we guide our character and the people we return to is what determines how we guide our days.

Your life is the days you return to

Any given day rounds to 0% of a life. And yet, it’s the accumulation of days that make one. If our days are filled with what we return to, then what we return to makes up our life.

There are two ideas about looping back in our lives that I’ve thought about this year. Nietzsche spoke of eternal recurrence- what if we were forced to relive our lives exactly as we acted them out, again and again for eternity. How would we act differently? And Buddhism has the concept of Samsara. That we’re all locked in a never ending cycle of rebirth into lives of suffering that can only be escaped by achieving enlightenment.

I don’t think either are that abstract. We return to days that are eerily similar to the last. This must be relatable, because I guess that’s why it’s a motif in films like Groundhog Day. Sometimes it feels like I’m reliving the same dumb mistakes every day. I hit snooze, wake up 1.5 hours later, and do it again the next day. I repeat my weeks- the same rush to finish homework at the end of this one, just like the last.

In fact, if you take any given day in a life, the days around it are probably similar. There’s a concept in CS called caching. Retrieving data is very slow, so if you retrieve a piece of data, it makes sense to retrieve the data next to it too, because there’s a high chance it will be relevant. If you ask me to ‘retrieve’ a day in my memory, it would be full of the same places, people and thoughts as the ones around it. This is why momentum is so important. If things are going well, they generally keep going well. If nothing is happening, nothing usually keeps happening. Which is why it’s worth putting an immense amount of effort to get momentum, or to configure our environments so that they nudge us to better things constantly.

And escaping Samsara, taken metaphorically, is identifying the loops in our days, and then being more mindful of them, so we can escape the bad ones. But we know we’re going to repeat loops. We know that to an extent, our days are a sort of eternal recurrence. So why not choose to live days we’re proud to repeat?

But how do we identify the bad loops? How do we live in loops we’re proud to repeat?

How to escape bad loops

You need to either escape the things you return to, or accept them and make them better. After a point, running away from what you return to is just running away from your life. I think people find all sorts of excuses and invent all kinds of malaise to avoid what they return to. But the things you’re repeatedly fascinated by, the ideas you can’t get rid of, the problems that come back to haunt you, these are your destiny.

What you’re good at is precisely what you effortlessly return to. But we focus on mitigating what we’re consciously bad at instead of getting even better at the things we’re subconsciously great at. This might be because the easy things come so effortlessly that they slip through the cracks of our consciousness, while the things we’re bad at get caught. But mitigation is only ever a bandaid- if we don’t love something, how can we ever become excellent at it? So if you know you’ve never been able to improve something, it makes much more sense to put effort into getting even better at the things you are good at.

So what do you do with the bad things you return to? Bad friends, bad schedules, bad thoughts? I say GTFO of those loops. We overcomplicate this. We act as if we have no agency, like we have to keep hanging out with a group of people, like we can’t help keep being negative. But you can simply choose to exit the loops. This often comes down to courage. Sticking in a negative loop can be comfortable because it’s what we know. Exiting it might mean confronting who we really are. It’s a lot easier to be the person who’s stuck in the loop of writing a book one day vs. actually having to put in the excruciating work and maybe failing.

If you really can’t exit a loop, I think you need to change your relationship with it so it’s something you’re at peace with always returning to. This usually involves loosening your expectations. I noticed I can’t help but make videos, but I’m always stuck. Maybe I just needed to make peace with making smaller, cuter videos more frequently. If you have a relationship that just doesn’t live up to your expectations, maybe you need to start noticing the joy that it does bring instead of the expectations it’s falling short of.

And sometimes we want to stay stuck in bad loops. I remember reading somewhere that if you’re in an environment where people are generally mean/shitty to you, it’s easy to turn that into self- hatred. The brain comes up with a coherent explanation for your situation- people are like this because I suck. This low-self-esteem loop is a coherent explanation the brain can always return to, it’s safe. But the correct thing to do here would be to transmute it into anger that motivates you into action that removes you from the environment. The pattern here is changing a low energy vibe you return to into a high energy vibe that allows you to escape into a good loop.

Good loops return to equilibrium and cause growth

Here is where I found a link between return and cybernetics, which is all about self regulating systems. Good loops often look like returning to equilibrium:

• Mindfulness is about returning to calm thoughts

• Good governments are about peacefully returning back to good leaders

• Good relationships are ones that repeatedly return to good vibes

• Life forms return to stable metabolic conditions

Self-regulating systems can lead to compounding growth, the other kind of good loop. Repeatedly returning to what the customer cares about can lead to a startup that grows exponentially. Repeatedly putting your money back into the stock market can lead to your wealth growing exponentially.

Even things that seem sub-linear often compound in counterintuitive ways. I used to think that exercising has sub-linear returns– each unit of effort doesn’t always directly lead to a unit of muscle growth. But even a slightly better mood and body affects my self confidence, which affects how people treat me, which improves my self confidence even more, which makes me want to exercise more, and so on, in a virtuous cycle.

Even woo ideas like karma have return-y explanations. Because the world is so densely connected with feedback loops, effects return really fast. If you change someone’s life for the better, and they change someone else for the better, 6 degrees of separation means that them passing it along will almost certainly come back to you.

In fact, I’d even say a good life is one with a lot of stable things you’re happy to return to. A calm mind, nice places, engaging work, and wonderful people you return to. And constantly returning to them means they all grow deeper.

But even if I know something is good for me, even if it’s something I return to a lot, I figured I still needed to be able to channel the return into something more structured. I could daydream about that project all I want, but unless I repeatedly returned to working on realizing it, nothing would happen. For that, I needed discipline.

Discipline as return

Schedules and discipline are a forced return to the day you planned for yourself (or was planned for you). Maybe it’s because I’m so bad at them, maybe because it feels exhausting when I do, but I’m terrible at following schedules. But a single episode of a TV show made me see them as a guide vs a prison.

In the show The Bear, Carmy Berzatto, a Michelin starred chef, returns to take over his recently deceased brother’s dysfunctional restaurant. Their family friend who had taken over operations, Richie, is this loud and petulant guy. Carmy sends him to stage at another Michelin starred restaurant to level up. He begins the week by waking up at 4:30am every day, coming to the restaurant, and drying forks the entire time.

Naturally, I felt for Richie. His schedule sucked. Waking up at 4:30am each day to dry forks, returning home late, and repeating the cycle. What’s the point of all the discipline? But later in the episode, as he’s allowed to extend his role to a waiter, we see that being constrained allowed him to develop excellence. Discipline- repeatedly returning to something he didn’t want to do- allowed him to see what he could be good at, and I mean really good at. By the end, he’s happily waking up early to study on his own time.

In retrospect, it’s obvious, though. Richie was always good at service. He always had an underlying love for it, he simply returned to who he really was. And I’ve felt this motif of returning into who I really am every time I think about growing up.

Growing up as returning to who you were as a child

I get frustrated that I’m too interested in everything, which makes me not return to things enough. John had told me that people like us were extremely curious, which meant we could talk about rabbit burrowing and find it fascinating. And I think that’s true. What a fascinating world we live in, why wouldn’t you be crushed with the weight of all the amazing stuff that we can learn and try every day?

But growing up has involved much more returning to what I used to do than I thought it would. I guess I assumed I might find something new in my Intellectual Hoe Phase, something that would carry me away. And while I did rediscover some interests in a new light, now, a year later, I find myself returning to my same set of underlying interests again. And they’re the same flavors of things I loved to do as a kid.

So growing up isn’t an act of departure– an escape from childish interests and fantasies– but rather a return– a return to who you were as a child, but now with a mature eye of pragmatism and work ethic. You know that you can get what you dreamt of. But you’re also pragmatic enough to know it’ll take a lot of work. You know that you can be anyone, but to actualise yourself into someone, you need to choose, to chain yourself to something.

It’s linked to character and feedback loops from above. If our character has certain predispositions, certain activities are always easier. Which means we get better faster. Which means it’s more fun, so we return to them more. Which means we get even better. And this compounds. Someone great at math in 1st grade will return to it maybe 100x more than someone who is even slightly worse. And so instead of fighting a losing battle, it makes sense to work on what you’re good at, because you’re going with the grain of your character instead of against it.

But I don’t think simply loving something is enough. You need to have discipline, but not in an overly self-coercive way, because then everything becomes sad and unplayful and boring. No, you need to return, firmly, with love.

Dedication as returning to things with love

Dedication is what you get when you combine discipline and love. It’s about returning to things you value again and again, knowing it’ll build into something bigger, but also doing it with a focus on the present, and doing it with love. The important thing here is identifying what things you love enough that you’re willing to be dedicated to them. Which people and work will you choose to repeatedly return to?

There’s a recurring bit in that same episode of the bear where Richie keeps seeing the words ‘every second counts’ on the wall. Based on the shitty tension filled kitchens we’ve seen in the show so far, we assume this is a shitty overworky slogan. But at the end, Richie meets the head Chef. She’s awake too, early in the morning, peeling mushrooms. Why in the world would the big boss want to do such a useless, banal thing? Because, she says, she wants diners to know that someone spent time on their dish. It’s time well spent.

Dedication, I think, is exactly that. It’s about time well spent. It’s about what you want to return to, even if it feels irrational in some universally objective sense. It is peeling mushrooms so your diners feel cared for more. Maybe it’s making things nobody sees the value in because you know it’ll bring a few people joy, even if it’s not going to save the world.

Beautiful things grow through dedication that wouldn’t otherwise. Friendships you repeatedly return to blossom, love goes from a shaky feeling that’s frittered away into something more lasting, your skill reaches depths you didn’t realize were possible.

I’m not always a dedicated person. I can be scattered. I wait too long for things to feel right. But like the LessWrong post about how we’re bad at pursuing goals, this be dumb. I think I first had to depart and then return to everything I know. And then I had to accept that I would keep returning to a certain set of things. And if I keep returning to them, I might as well become dedicated to them.

I have such a deep feeling of acceptance for the things I return to right now. Like, this was my childhood, these are my childhood friends. These are my interests, and from them, the tasks I have laid out in front of me. I know my character, I know the people I love, and I think I know how to manage that thing called love a bit better. I know what I want to stay dedicated to.

Life is a multitude of returns, intertwined in an ever- unfolding braid. They say that after a certain age, you get the face you deserve. Of course, I know now that the things you return to are the things that shape it. When someone reads mine, many years from now, I wonder what it will say.