Reflections on 2020
Hi everyone,
I’d like to claim that I deliberately changed the scheduling of my newsletter to go out on new year’s eve this week, but the reality is that I just failed to write it yesterday. But given that I’m writing this on new year’s eve (and am going to schedule this to go out just before midnight) I might as well make it about that.
So, 2020. Strange year, huh?
For me it’s been a mix of terrible and weirdly good. I unironically think 2020 might be the best year of my life to date, but also it’s been terrible, both for me and much more so for others.
(There’s a meme about what wish you made that 2020 was an ironic fulfilment of, and I suppose mine is “I wish people understood that things can be good and bad at the same time and that this doesn’t cancel out”. cf. Kaj Sotala’s piece on that topic).
Right back at the beginning of the year, I sat down with my supervisor and had a big chat about how my PhD wasn’t quite working for me and that the reason was largely down to not enough face to face interaction with the academic community, and we talked about solutions to this that would work - going to more conferences, attending some of the seminars at other universities in London, that sort of thing.
Um, yeah.
The reality is that 2020 is a year in which I’ve got almost nothing done on my PhD. I did finally get the paper published that I’ve been trying on and off to publish for more than two years: Test-Case Reduction via Test-Case Generation: Insights From the Hypothesis Reducer. It’s a good paper and I gave a pretty good talk about it, but by the time the online conference for it came around I was very done with it and the conference ended up mostly a depressing reminder of the contrast between 2020 as-it-was and as-it-could-have-been.
Back in June I wrote Why am I not working on my PhD? and outlined what seemed like a very good plan for fixing this problem of not working on my PhD. I ended up not following it at all. There are a variety of reasons for this, but I think the ultimate reason was that in 2020 it was very hard for me to convince myself that the intricate details of test-case reduction was the most important thing I could work on. This is partly because working on it in isolation isn’t that important to me without the resulting connection to the academic community that I was hoping to get out of 2020, and partly because I felt like I had other things to work on.
Which is part of why my writing really took off this year. Even before the pandemic took off, I’d started a daily writing practice. You can see most of it in this twitter thread of links and summaries:
I eventually abandoned the daily writing (I might try my hand again at it in February to commemorate that being the month I started in 2020), but this lead directly to this newsletter, and in turn to Notes on Emotions. It’s also what’s lead to me having a bit of a coaching business, which isn’t something I would really have predicted myself as ever doing if you’d asked me in 2019, but is so far very positive.
This has all been really valuable to me, in that it feels like I’ve been putting together a lot of thoughts on problems that have been with me for a very long time (some of them in some form for really all of the last thirty years or so, some of them stretching back as little as a decade) and starting to get some real traction on them, and also seems to be genuinely helpful to other people (presumably including you if you’re reading this).
The result has been very positive if, occasionally, deeply annoying. I basically fixed my social anxiety back in January and then *gestures at everything*. I’m looking forward to late 2021 when I can actually see people in person. It’s going to be great.
On the plus side, 2020 has been a great year for working on my relationships (romantic and otherwise). I moved to be near my partners, which has been amazing, and WhatsApp and Twitter have been a godsend for building relationships with people close to me and finding new and weird communities to hang out with.
I’ve also started two discord servers, bookchat and Weird CS Theory. Neither are quite as active as I’d hoped, but they’ve been a nice touch of community this year that I kinda lacked even prior to 2020 but definitely lacked in 2020.
So, all in all, some pretty great things have been happening.
But also I haven’t been working on my PhD, and it’s starting to become acutely obvious to me that I haven’t had a “real job” for a full five years now (I’ve done things that have made some money, and coaching is totally a real job if I take it seriously, but right now it’s side hustle and I’d kinda like to keep it that way), and if I’m going to do all this talk about how to sort your life out I should probably sort my life out in these respects.
So I guess 2021 is the year where I either properly get myself on track to finish my PhD or decide not to (I’m not saying I’m going to finish my PhD in 2021, but I’m either going to abandon it in 2021 or finish it in 2022). I’m pretty keen on the version where I finish it, but if I really truly decide it’s not the right thing to do with my life it’s an option to not finish it too.
How am I going to do that? Well, not sure. I’ll figure something out, and you’ll probably hear about it here.
When I started out this newsletter I was very keen on understanding the connection between work and value (the “total work” sequence, though I don’t think sequences was ever the right format for this newsletter), and I rather abandoned that as part of my increased focus on sorting my emotions and relationships out a bit more. Also it was slightly aversive because it was clear how much I was avoiding anything that actually should be considered my “real work”. I suspect there will be a return to some of those themes.
I admit that doing a deep exploration of the nature of value and its connection to our sources of meaning as human beings might still seem a bit like procrastinating on my computer science PhD, but in my defence:
Everybody needs a hobby.
Completing this PhD is definitely a life-complete problem for me.
A thing that I accidentally exposed recently was that I apparently have some deep-seated issues around answering questions like “What are my goals?” and “What do I actually want?”, so asking questions like “Why do I actually want to do this?” around my PhD is… not that helpful right now. Not to mention that I have a huge TODO list anxiety that seems to be centred around things like obligation. I’m sure that has no impact on doing a PhD whatsoever, right? 😬
But at the same time it seems pretty reasonable. I’m not sure anyone makes it out of a PhD without needing therapy, might as well do the therapy to myself along the way, given that my weird idiosyncratic approach to that is well suited to actually solving life problems and seems to be unusual enough for me to write a book about it. With any luck, you’ll enjoy coming along for the ride with me.
And on that note, welcome to 2021.