Supermodelling

Seems I never quite got back to sleep. It turns out that I don’t want to stop blogging, since I enjoy it. What I will do, though, is broaden the range and nature of my posts — rather than attempt to focus on a particular subject matter, this blog will become a more general and personal creative outlet. Many of my topics will be along the lines of things I’ve written about previously since I find them particularly interesting, but others (such as this one) will not. I hope that friends, family, acquaintances, similarly-minded strangers, and bored far-future archeology robots will find something worthwhile here. If not, oh well.

In modern casual Christian mythology, St. Peter tends the gates of heaven, interviewing prospective entrants.

“And what did you do with your life?” he would ask me.

“Well, I spent a lot of time watching progress bars on my computer screen.”

He would nod, having heard that quite a lot. “And?”

“Hmm. I wrote a lot of code.” And sure enough, that’s true. My 10,000 hours and more have been spent coding — the closest thing I have to a theme for my life.

When I was younger, I’d code like mad. I’d code all day. I’d code all night. It didn’t matter really what the program was for, the process of telling a whirling, blinking machine exactly what to do — in every excruciating detail — was completely absorbing to me. I flowed, outside time, undistractable, bodiless.

Eventually, I made a career of it — along with inventing ideas about which programs to write and organizing the efforts of teams of coders. Today I still spend a fair bit of time coding. But over time typing computer code became like driving a car: an almost unconscious reflex… and bit by bit my passion for it withered away. Coding for its own sake no longer consumes or fulfills me. It’s a thing I do well, but the passion is gone. Sometimes (not as often as I’d like) the reason for a particular coding task motivates me strongly, but the process itself is just the means to an end now, a trade skill.

I think it’s common for middle-aged folks like me to realize that passion has dissipated and we get upset about that. Recently I wondered whether I might be able to ignite a new passion around, say, making music, but I’m full of doubt over whether I have the willpower to put in 10,000 hours at this late time in my life, training ear and voice and fingers — or even whether I have enough inborn capability to make such an enterprise worthwhile.

Explaining all that time spent on refining tiny muscle movements to St. Peter also seems problematic.

The general question of how one should spend one’s precious hours does haunt me. There’s a thousand things I love to do, and none that I love to do enough. I do know that musing about things — a lazy dilettante hobby — gives me pleasure, and indulging this desire has never caused me to look backward with regret. So… muse I shall.

It might be that if enough people muse visibly on the internet in the great gooey blogosphere, like the chattering of a million subconscious thought fragments in a global mind, something like a gestalt understanding might emerge in a big evolving cloud of shadowy concepts. If that happens, will we even recognize it?

One thing I find particularly interesting is how difficult it is to communicate ideas about abstract and poorly-understood subjects such as philosophy and artificial intelligence. Reading conversations on mailing lists and discussion forums, I’m always amazed at how people that are earnestly and sincerely interested in these questions often talk completely past each other, as if we all speak our own private dialects sharing nothing more than a few suggestive vocabulary terms.

This great murmuring babble wafts outward into the ether; I wonder if angels and old souls living in heaven can make sense of it, and if this type of music is pleasing to the celestial ear. Perhaps someday I’ll know the answer.