My last year in my thirties began with a four-day weekend built around the idea of having the Olympics in Tokyo. The Olympic Games have been postponed due to the spread of the new coronavirus COVID19; we will eventually know if it will only be postponed for a year or if it will be cancelled. Many people have experienced how an Internet connection allows them to get things done without having to physically assemble. On the other hand, there have been tragedies such as not being able to see family members who live far away, not being able to enter Japan because of lack of nationality even though they have lived in Japan for many years, or only being able to take online courses all the time even though they have entered university. It was also an opportunity for many people to experience the Berlin Wall-like things where physical separation cannot be crossed. People dying from infectious diseases and people dying from economic stagnation, the trolley problem became a real problem, not a philosophical thought experiment. There was so much anger on social media that I felt like avoiding the negative effects on my psyche of being exposed to it. This is the “Anger is a form of self-pity” mindset that I’ve been aware of for some time. Maybe this is selfish escapism.
When the world around us is filled with the poison of anger, we need to take the latest precautions to prevent ourselves from being poisoned. The metaphor is the same for the mind, lest it be unknowingly infected by a virus and spread. We must watch our hearts so that we do not become infected with anger and then amplify and spread that anger. This activity reveals more about my values. I apparently do not care much about the lives of others. On the other hand, I feel resistance to the loss of educational opportunities. This led me to the idea of crime against civilization. Even if some elderly people die, in the long run, the loss to civilization is not so great because those who will eventually die will die a little earlier. On the other hand, the loss of educational opportunities for high school and college students, for example, is a big loss in the long run.
Perhaps for those who actually fear for their lives, their own lives are important, and for those who are dying economically right now, the long-term gains and losses of civilization are probably a pipe-dream. So I don’t expect a mass consensus on these values, and I think that’s fine. On the other hand, when I think about it in light of my values that have been clarified, I cannot see the answer as to what I should do now. Originally, my work was a type of self-determination of “what to do. Until last year, when COVID was not even a shadow of its former self, I had just finished a project called “The Intellectual Production of Engineers”, in which I delved into the process of intellectual production and translated it into language, and I thought that the development of electronic intellectual production support tools that were suggested as necessary now, and the development of the language of the translated products, should be done. I thought it was the right thing to do to expand the project into multiple languages. Is that really right?
Conviction about what one should do is an important resource for doing things, but by what is this obtained?
For the past few weeks, I have been devoting time to studying algorithms. Investing time in acquiring knowledge that is less likely to become obsolete has been a successful pattern in my life so far. But doing this now is clearly not the right thing to do, I’m just running away from my past success patterns.
Hmmm, I didn’t plan for the story to flow like this, but when I started by explaining the situation for myself a few years later, it came off as heavy-handed. The original plan was to
- Working from home and not getting enough exercise, commuting was surprisingly continuous exercise.
- Once I properly measured my nutritional intake, I found that I was protein deficient.
- I want to be in the standard weight range by the time I turn 40 and maintain that for 10 years. I thought it was about the same.
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