The "why bothers"

A friend of mine called me in tears the other day because she didn’t think that she could carry on with the master’s course we’re signed up for. She said (and I agreed) that we are under-prepared for the topic: she and I both recently finished a bridge program converting us from our humanities backgrounds to computer science, and there’s no way a part-time one-year on-line program can prepare you adequately to face down all the intricacies of a master’s degree in a discipline to which you were previously alien. She had signed up for a course in machine learning which is, as you know, all math; neither she nor I have done any serious math since high school, and she was understandably intimidated by the “warm up” exercise of finding the Jacobian of a matrix. I sure as hell couldn’t do it.

She asked whether I ever fight the “why bothers,” and it hadn’t ocurred to me till that very moment that I do. You’ll notice that this blog has gone mostly silent, for which I’m not going to apologize. What I’m doing here is in its essence stupid, self-centered, arrogant, and tedious. This body of work is constituted as uninteresting to anyone but me. So why bother? What’s there to be gained? The purpose of human life and endeavor is either of these two: to perpetuate the species, or to maximize accumulated capital. Everything else that isn’t in the service of one or the other of these goals (the second is more de facto than de natura, but the first is almost certainly universally acceptable) is frivolous. But since I am not really sure what to do to advance either of those goals when I wake up in the morning, and it’s not clear that I progress towards them by going to school, it’s hardly any consolation. And anyway, maximizing accumulated capital, which I am conceivably doing by my training in a technical discipline, is not something I am particularly interested in, given how much damage it has caused to the human species thus far and the risk it poses for our continued survival. So then it’s really “why bother?”.

It seems selfish and stupid to say, but “for my own edification” is the best answer I’ve come up with: building myself up is the only reason I have to get up in the morning. That, and the desire to please other people: I’d hate to let anyone down. I started this blog to share my travels and because keeping a blog seems like a cool thing to do, but it’s not as if I’ve been backpacking lately. Frankly, and I don’t think I’m alone in this, I tend to think of it as serving my own practice of writing. “Blog” is a portmanteau and abbreviation of “web log,” which means in other words “a diary published online.” I’m certainly not prepared to write anything of any great interest: I’m just a dilettante, a dabbler. I couldn’t in good faith suggest that this has any interest to anyone else, but that’s not the point: it’s of interest to me. It’s an incoherent mess, but then again, it’s a log, not a cohesive work: I write these little articles as a snapshot of my state of being at the time I sat down to write it. So there, take that you “why bothers.”