Breaking the Streak

 This is my 200th blog post, and the 51st Friday I have posted in a row. I have published a new blog post every Friday during 2020, and one of the things that kept me going was the desire to keep it up every Friday of an entire year. But I have decided I am going to break the streak now on December 11. Here is why:

Throughout the tribulations of 2020, one of the major things that kept me sane was keeping up with my streaks. I was writing books, making a YouTube channel, learning Japanese, and keeping up with this blog, and I was meeting my deadlines for all of them. Being unemployed during COVID-19, it was a way of proving to myself that I was a responsible person who kept up with productive habits.

This changed mid-November. It was National Novel Writing Month, and I had finally landed a job as a contract tutor for an online company. This meant I had to keep up with doing my job, writing 1,667 words per day, 1/2 hour a day on Japanese practice, writing a blog post every week, and uploading a new video to YouTube every two weeks.

And I crashed.

The first sign was when I did not get my YouTube video up on Tuesday like usual, and had to upload it on Wednesday instead. You might roll your eyes and say, “Big deal.” But for someone whose sense of self-worth hinged on keeping up with his streaks, it was a big deal, and it was the first domino to fall.

A week and a half later, I fell short of the 1,667 daily word goal. It was the first time in the five years I have done NaNoWriMo that I missed a goal I set myself.

That was it. From then on, it was all I could do to write 200 words every day, much less 1.7 thousand. The streak was broken, and it wasn’t coming back.

That was when I started to seriously think about what I was putting myself through with all these hobbies. So much work, and for what? Almost nobody reads my blog posts or stories. I don’t even like Japanese culture. I’m poor and essentially unemployed, and these things are taking away from time I could be spending on a job.

I quit Japanese practice when my streak reached 600 days, and have hardly thought about it since. No regrets. When November was over, I stopped writing my book, even though the story wasn’t finished yet. Of all my hobbies, there are only two streaks left: YouTube and this blog.

I am going to keep up with YouTube, because having one hobby is healthy, and YouTube is the one that gives me the most joy and sense of purpose right now. But for A Scientist’s Fiction, this post will be the final post in my streak.

You may say, “Chris, there are only two Fridays left in 2020. You made it through NaNoWriMo. It’s smooth sailing from here. Why not just finish it up?”

And I could. I had planned for this to be the final blog post, and had two others lined up for this week and next week. I could write those and finish out the year. But I won’t.

This crisis has brought me face to face with parts of myself I never wanted to acknowledge, and forced me to rethink my values and motivations. The truth is, for as long as I can remember I have lived in pursuit of approval and validation. I wanted everyone to see how smart and wise and talented I am. This has led me to build up all of these streaks and crank out blog posts, many of them ending up not good.

I could finish out the year, getting those satisfying check marks filling out the entire 2020 Fridays chart. But that would mean giving in to the forces that drove me to crash. Breaking off this streak two weeks before my goal is my way of tossing that aside and signaling to myself that I’m ready to live with new, more wholesome and sustainable motivations.

I will still update this blog from time to time, but when I do, it will not be because I want to feel good about myself, but because I have something worth saying. Starting now, I will focus on four things: strengthening my relationships with my friends and family whom I could not be more thankful for, my physical health, making quality YouTube videos, and making tangible steps toward a realistic and sustainable career.

Until next time.

Don't Idolize People

Sometimes we have the desire to find a person who has profound insight and follow them, listening to their every word like it is holy revelation. We look for this infallible saint among religious figures, philosophers, leaders of social movements, and famous entrepreneurs. In my own life, I grew up in among American Conservative Christian culture, and I believed they had all the answers. Then I started to see the flaws in that ideology, and I discovered Sam Harris, who seemed to have all the answers Christianity didn’t.

But then I started noticing Sam’s blind spots, and I searched again, finding other wise thinkers, including Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein, and Sean Carroll. And while all of these people have good ideas worth listening to, they also all have blind spots and ideas that are not so much worth listening to. And so I discovered something that should be obvious, but is not so easy to act as though we believe: No one has all the answers. No one is worth pledging our intellect to follow.

So how do we gain knowledge and wisdom without falling prey to the same pitfalls as the people we follow? The answer is to listen to many different people who come at ideas from different angles, and not to dismiss their ideas just because they are different from the way we think. We learn to evaluate their ideas, take wisdom where we find it, and leave foolishness behind.

As someone who seeks out new perspectives, especially ones I am told not to listen to, I am one of the few people who have read both Ayn Rand and Karl Marx. Both of these thinkers have a lot of bad ideas, but they also both have some good ideas worth listening to.

Rand’s big idea that hooks so many people is the idea of living rationally. To choose goals for one’s life and work toward those goals using reason, not tradition or peer pressure or rules or authority. This is a very empowering way of thinking, which I admit I have not done well in my life so far, and am working at doing better.

However, that’s about the only idea of Rand’s that’s worth anything. Claiming to have bridged the is-ought gap and discovered objective symbolism and ideals is just bad philosophy, and to declare that people who do not live rationally are not worthy of partaking in the bounty of life is despicable. These ideas are the mark of someone who is full of herself trying to seize power and control the social narrative.

Marx is infamous for being the communism guy who inspired the totalitarian takeover of Russia and China and caused the collapse of many smaller countries. This means Marx is bad, right?

Not so fast. Marx identified a lot of legitimate problems with capitalism, some of which are still relevant today. For starters, he identified the problem of inequality of opportunity. In his day, it was much more rigid, with two distinct classes: the bourgeoisie, who owned factories, fields, and natural resource deposits; and the proletariat, who worked the fields, factories, mines, and stores in exchange for enough money to buy enough food to go back to work the next day.

These days it is easier for a factory worker or truck driver to rise up the ranks, get a good recommendation, and start their own business. But it is still hard, and relies on all kinds of factors out of the person’s control, like health, access to education, good connections, an encouraging environment, and natural talent. A sad fact of our economy is that the less money someone has, the harder it is to make money, and the less educated someone is, the harder it is to get more education. Forces are at play to keep those at the bottom of the economy poor.

Marx is considered the father of Social Conflict Theory, the idea that we humans divide ourselves into groups and those groups compete with one another for resources and status. Marx himself was a reductionist, saying all of human history is class conflict, which is clearly not correct, but it is equally clear that social conflict does play a significant role in history, and it is an essential lens for studying social science and for trying to resolve social issues.

For Marx and Rand alike, we should do what we do with all thinkers; take the good and leave the bad. The same is true for Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michel Foucault, Søren Kierkegaard, the writers of the American Constitution, Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius. All have wisdom worth listening to, and all have pitfalls we can fall into if we follow them too zealously.