I am convinced that sleep (and taking long walks) are the bedrock of mental well-being. What happens internally helps you manage what happens externally. So, in that spirit, I started taking some supplements to optimize my sleep. One of these is magnesium, two variants are the more popular for sleep: l-threonate and glycenate. I have noticed different responses. It is reported that glycenate variant improves muscle recovery, while l-threonate improves brain recovery. Interestingly, I have more nightmares and dreams taking l-threonate. Glycenate seems to only induce happy dreams. I wonder if this is because l-threonate is actually enabling my brain to process and revisit past traumas or other emotionally-charged events. It looks like taking l-threonate is analogous to doing a deep cleaning of your fridge. It is unpleasant, but your fridge will sparkle afterwards.

I’m having a hard time finding a recorded lecture that is delivered with scholarship, eloquence, passion, and vigor as the one that historian Timothy Snyder gave at Yale in 2015 on his book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.”

The historian managed to speak for 50 straight minutes without looking at his notes, relying on slides, or interacting with the audience. It was all eye contact and gestures. And he was going fast —very fast.

I downloaded the full transcript of his lecture and decided to analyze it. Barring the scant filler words, it read like a well-edited 20-page essay. It is quite remarkable to read a stream of consciousness that progresses so eloquently and clearly. It is as if listening to a single thread throughout European history that explains everything.

The historian begins from extracting ideas from primary sources —Hitler’s Mein Kampf; differentiates the idea of “global antisemitism” from other types of antisemitism; distills Hitler’s core ideas of political philosophy —ecological panic that justifies Lebensraum—; debunks historical interpretations of the Holocaust by previous scholars (Hannah Arendt, Zygmund Bauman); and claims new theories that challenge decades of historical interpretation. He then concluded with the implications of drawing the wrong lessons today (we may be closer to the next Holocaust than we think). And he managed to do all of that in 50 minutes, non-stop!

It must have been an energizing, engaging, and electrifying evening. One must have felt the rush to get out of that lecture room and go change the world. It must have been something to remember.

In an inter-connected world, finding friends has never been more easy, and yet these relationships have never been more fragile. The increased pool of potential friend relations, enabled by meetup apps and social media, makes relations more ephemeral and fragile.

Before social media, finding friends required meeting in third places (bars, barber shops, parks, private clubs, hotel lounges, sports leagues, coffee shops, even laundromats). Once these relations were established, it required some effort to keep in touch. And so the epistolary form was the norm. Postcards. Telegrams. Hand-drawn letters. Street telephones fed with silver coins.

The addictive nature of algorithms (and screens in general) has down-graded us all. We have been domesticated to a fast/expeditious lifestyle, and so we have grown impatient and restless. We are now starved by dopamine hits. In this social milieu, friendships now break at the minimal friction.

It is in this context that slow friendships, the type that require effort and patience and forgiveness, are ever more valuable. Cherish those dearly.

I am at that age where my friends are getting married. This Labor Day Weekend I traveled to California to attend a dear friend’s wedding. For this one, I was invited to be one of the groomsmen. One of us was assigned the role of a videographer to document messages by each of us to the bride and groom. The videographer would then compile the short messages into a well produced video for posterity.

Here was an intentional exercise in thinking as a remembering self. It is not enough to have a good time, one is concerned with the business of making memories. The experience of reconnecting with old friends, to share the joy with the newly weds, to experience exquisite food, to share tears with the bride as she recollects her memories. These are all necessary, but not sufficient. We record, we document, we make memories. We craft memories for the future: we take photographs with vintage cameras, we get drones in the sky to document the whole event from unusual perspectives, we hire professional wedding photographers to capture idealized moments. 

The whole enterprise is an effort to inter-twine the experiencing self and the remembering self. As Daniel Kahneman points out, these may never reconcile. The memory of a past that is not exactly what happened.

As I finish designing an introductory course on conservation science, I cannot help but reflect on the big ideas. One of them is the inherent lesson of time: all buildings eventually decay and fall, just as we humans will all eventually decay, and if one stretches the time scale to millions of years, our planet will eventually face death. There will be a time when the Sun will become a red star and absorb the Earth. The Universe itself will eventually die: it will stop expanding and may begin to contract, a process that will eventually lead back to the Big Bang.

Entropy is inevitable. There is no way of escaping the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Knowing the inevitability of entropy makes every endeavor a bit futile, including designing a course on conservation, a bit meaningless. Why bother organizing files and worrying about student’s learning if we will all eventually face death? I suppose one escapes this existential futility by realizing that our experience with reality is limited by three dimensions. Time is the fourth dimension we can only experience as something that only moves in a direction. For us, it is a reluctant vector pointing at a single direction: forward.

Maybe there are beings in the fourth dimension whose notion of time is not as a set vector, but something more malleable. Maybe every tiny effort in organizing a course, every step in prolonging a building or site from its inevitable decay, serves a purpose we as three-dimensional beings are unable to grasp. Maybe every single step, every effort, every action, does count towards something.

Last night I had a nightmare about being persecuted by drug cartels trying to end everyone’s lives. I was in my dad’s hotel and was running away, looking for a place to hide. A place for safety. My instinct was to get to the roof and climb one of the water towers and seek shelter. I was concerned about making any noise with the water splashing. I then became aware this hiding spot was a bit too obvious and should seek a less obvious spot. One that is explicitly overt it becomes overt. I wonder during dreams one involves the prefrontal cortex to make higher-level decision making like this effort to outsmart the cartels. I wonder if you can perform rational reasoning in your dreams.

This weekend I went to New York City to attend a club event. On Saturday, I spent the late afternoon reading at the Rose Reading Room. When the library closed, I then headed for dinner in Bryant Park. There was an event happening in the main open greenspace and it got very crowded, very quickly. The green chairs that NYC Parks provided for free became a commodity, a privilege.

Someone had left his seat to drop his trash and on his return found someone else had taken it for his family table. An argument ensued. Shouts and cursory words were in the air. You could sense the anger palpitating in his jugular. The police got involved.

If people got mad for a green chair, one wonders the implications when the resource in question is more serious, like water or food. Scarcity does summon the devils of our nature.

Yesterday I went to bed late watching movies against my optimistic belief I could just go straight to bed from work and wake up by 6am.

A winding down buffer of at least an hour and a half is always needed —preferably not involving screens and involving more pages. I wonder what other areas of my daily routine I fall into the over-confidence trap, the belief I can do everything. It certainly pushes me to try out things with impossible standards as a baseline. That outlook is certainly beneficial and detrimental. For one, it makes me late to appointments and commitments, because I believe I can extract the value of every minute to do more and assume the best conditions of the world to make me get to a place. I suppose one must compliment optimism with preparedness. Aim for the stars so you can reach the treetops.

Knowledge about how your colleagues do things helps you become a better colleague. It uproots mistakes from your end and saves headaches to everyone in the work ecosystem. It helps make things easier to them.

It reminds me of Socrates’ insight that ignorance is the most common root for evil. Ignorance about how things work only create mistakes that are misunderstood as bad-faith —often by the same people primed to preserve hierarchies.

Now knowledge is power. And one must build up guardrails to protect systems from bad actors. I suppose this is a big reason why organizations should spend time and money to hire people of values and who know themselves well —a rare combination.

I admire the work of journalist Anne Applebaum. She has a knack for producing details through her reporting that are unpredictably illustrative of her arguments. She does not produce your expected narrative to fit a bucket of left wing or right wing journalism. Incisive, thoughtful, and razor-sharp. We need mode people like Anne.