Vansh Kumar

obeying the inscrutable exhortations of my soul

i like to think and feel

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

🧵with inspirations for building the work/life I want

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

https://t.co/eUVCoYwJqF

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

Created a comic memoir of the 1947 Partition of India, as seen through my grandfather’s childhood memories

[Adrienne Fairhall @alfairhall]

In systems neuroscience, this is simply not the case. Paradigms are challenged and updated all the time.

[ftlsid @ftlsid]

two days ago I had probably the most profound experience of my life, a kind of emotional shift related to the experience of love. the summary is that I suddenly noticed that many of my motivations and habits were predicated on the belief that I needed to fix and improve myself in order to earn love. which made me very sad, so I cried about it for a long time. after that something very fundamental seems to have shifted. I'd like to capture it while it's still fresh.

the idea of needing to earn love through self-improvement wasn't simply an intellectual belief; more like something embedded in my relationship with reality. the moment of noticing felt less like figuring out a math problem and more like profound catharsis, as if some exhausted part of me was finally relieved of duty. I don't fully understand what changed, but the following is my tentative explanation based on explorations over the last two years and various background reading.

a basic ability of the mind is to infer causality from experiences. with causal inference it becomes possible to draw a trajectory from proximate conditions to distant and uncertain future outcomes. this interacts closely with desire; the mind prioritizes understanding the causes of desired outcomes, and over time, the inferred precursors of the desired outcome themselves become objects of desire. in fact, it seems to be possible to forget the original desire entirely and just pursue these proxy objects blindly.

people intrinsically want love, affection, and attention. you can see where this is going. if one learns early on that love is conditional on something else, then the causal inference engine kicks in and starts figuring out how to act in order to obtain love. so there are, roughly speaking, two orientations: love is conditional, and love is unconditional. the first makes love a problem to be solved, and the second doesn't worry about it too much. this is the difference between insecure and secure attachment.

my experience is that the first orientation (conditional) feels fundamentally unsatisfactory, and the second (unconditional) feels like everything is and always will be okay. I guess this has to do with the fact that implicit in desire is the premise of separation. if love is ontologically something that I have to work towards, then it's not something that's available to me in the present moment, and I'm never fully okay. what tripped me up in understanding this is that people often say "love is unconditional" as a metaphysical or religious truth, but that seems to be a distraction if you're thinking about this stuff for practical reasons. that said, religion is one way of installing the belief in unconditional love in children. in that sense it's probably the most important social tool that exists, and it's very unfortunate that we're losing it.

so you want to move from orientation 1 to orientation 2. this is where it gets murky. hypothetically, evidence that love is freely available should be enough for the mind to shift the priors. I see two problems that inhibit this happening automatically. first, going back to the idea that the original desire can be forgotten when pursuing proxy desires - I think the pain of not feeling loved is so great that the wound contrives to conceal itself, and the mind reifies the proxy desires (e.g. money, status, sex, achievement) as the true root desires. this is of course related to one's identity (as a mid-twenties guy, it's way easier to believe that I'm really ambitious than it is to notice that i'm filling a bottomless pit because I believe i'm unlovable). second, the belief that love is conditional leads to all kinds of behaviors that probe and test connections to obtain reassurance about their stability. maybe the truth is that the only love that can be unconditionally reciprocated is the love that is freely given away. which is a little fucked up if you think about it.

to fix this I meditated for a while (few hundred hours), which gave me easy access to crying. then I did a lot of IFS with chatgpt, then I tried Core Transformation (also with chatgpt) which caused the shift in one session. maybe it would have happened immediately if I did CT two years ago, but I doubt it. for reason 1 above (wound is concealed) it's quite difficult to sit down and try to fix this intentionally; the entire time I was doing this stuff I thought I was trying to do something else. early on it was becoming more productive, then it was fixing my anxiety and experiencing less suffering, then when that went away it was about being able to connect with people more easily, then a few days ago the question popped into my mind - why am I working so hard on becoming better at connection? and the whole thing unraveled.

there's a paradox here, which is that on one hand the orientation towards yourself as a broken thing that needs fixing is precisely what creates the sense of dissatisfaction, and on the other hand that orientation needs to be corrected to move forward. I think what breaks through this paradox is compassion towards oneself. Be slow, be gentle, be kind

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

It’s hard to do this though! The notion of goal often has a lot of identity tied up in it

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

I’ve been trying to internalize the view that ambitious goals are useful as they illuminate a path that maximizes learning and enjoyment, not as ends in themselves

They are valuable tools for organizing your present activity in fun & interesting ways

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

If you adopt this view it also makes it easier to be more flexible in changing the goal if something more interesting pops up

You don’t care as much about the actual end state; you care about what produces the most interesting path

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

@ftlsid I see, but your contention is that feelings like shame are constructed from what you think others think?

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

@ftlsid How can you tell if the other came first vs the self?

In other words, why is self = internalized other rather than others = externalized self?

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

@andy_matuschak apologies if you’ve covered this somewhere, but what’s your process for creating Anki cards while reading? I tend to read physical books/on Kindle and it’s annoying/disruptive for various reasons to need my laptop nearby to enter Anki cards

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

Hardware and software co-evolved together

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

It’s noteworthy that animals at every single stage of evolution were fully functional

They could basically always do things like: move, explore/exploit, have some level of contextual memory, associative learning, and capabilities were incrementally built over time

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

Even the smallest brains never suffered from catastrophic forgetting (new knowledge overwriting old knowledge)

Animals were always functional in the real world, by definition – there weren’t systems that were really good at image recognition or whatever but couldn’t move a body

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

At the end of the day I’m just grateful I get to live in & learn about such a magical scientific world

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

It’s a little annoying because working on science/tech things is still associated with a ‘striver’ identity for me, which comes with all kinds of insecurities

But those will dissolve with time

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

And really I’m lucky that my natural interests growing up aligned easily with what is considered ‘high status’ and makes money — I don’t feel that I had to make many sacrifices or tradeoffs compared to others

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

Within a few months, I found myself reading books about chaos theory

I tried to fight it for a while longer, but the conclusion that I actually enjoy this stuff is inescapable

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

“You can never go too far when you can’t come back home again“ (Ultralight Beam)

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

After quitting I felt a strong desire to not work on anything tech related & switch to a totally different field, partly because I was disillusioned with some aspects of tech

[Vansh Kumar @lunchwithav]

Starting in mid-late college, and especially after graduating and working for a while, I lost the thread of that interest

Science, tech, math were much more instrumental in my life compared to before - they were how I made money after all