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What is the definition of “interesting”?
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Here’s one:
Someone or something that is interesting keeps your attention because he, she, or it is unusual, exciting, or has a lot of ideas
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Unusual
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Exciting
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Has a lot of ideas
Meaningful intersection of class dynamics
- My adopted sister comes from, to not sugar-coat it, the underclass, an underworld that most people don’t think about. Everyone on government benefits, alcoholism, schizophrenia, terrible education, no role models, trauma, council houses
- My dad’s dad was a coal miner, my mum’s grandad was a lorry driver, his wife washed clothes in a giant vat
- My dad set up a successful business and paid himself as little as possible to ensure the business was solvent and save for retirement. My mum was a part-time nurse
- I grew up in a village with a private school (that I didn’t attend), and worked at the corner shop, and served the private school kids
- I did my Master’s at Imperial College London, where everyone seemed to be middle class as shit, with a lot of foreign exchange students paying something like 4x the fees, very “our families go skiing every year” vibes, very wealthy and seemingly well-adjusted
- And also my ~networking and agency has got me into interesting spaces. I once made a friend at a “Cellular Agriculture” conference in New York, and then the next year the event was in Boston, so they invited me to stay at their families place in Boston, and it was the most insanely upper class thing I had ever seen. Picture of their parents with Obama on my bed-side table, essentially a mansion in the city, huge library, amazing art, insanely big. Dad is something like a famous Harvard business professor + entrepreneur, mum (mom) is a high-level lawyer, brother went to Harvard and was on the Harvard lampoon, now trying to make it in Hollywood, etc. Just a wild completely different world from my home life back home, my god
- And also e.g. I was flown out to the Bahamas on FTX’s dime, I attended a house party at Sam Bankman Fried’s brother’s place, where he played the piano a lot (American Pie is a very long song).
- Also my girlfriend’s aunty & uncle were both GPs and we’d visit them and their 3 kids all went to private school and were very well adjusted because you know, lived with their two parents who were both GPs. One of my gf’s cousins became a doctor, another a banker, etc. Meanwhile I’m sat there all traumatised and shit, never seen such a nice house, never been around such a well adjusted family, literally no idea what to do, I spent most of my childhood and teenage years in my room, and all my family members were awkward and would leave occassional family meals as soon as they could
Meaningful ambivalent relationship w/ the intellect & education
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I was a smart kid, I was a really good writer, I was good at maths, but I didn’t have any parental encouragement → my mum wasn’t intellectual at all, and my dad didn’t live with me
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I picked biomedical sciences as my undergrad because, whilst I would have loved to do philosophy or english literature, I knew there wouldn’t be jobs in those areas, and I was kind of sort of interested in STEM
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I ended up getting involved in effective altruism, but wasn’t one of the elite few, wasn’t well educated, wasn’t a good thinker, didn’t have anything technical to contribute
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I’m unusual in how much I’ve worked to "improve myself"
- At 19, on weed, during my second year at uni, it hit me → “I’m boring, and I’m not impressive, I need to work hard to improve”. The first thing I stumbled across was productivity youtube and r/selfimprovement and I went ham, and didn’t have any elders to talk to, didn’t have any resources for figuring out if these approaches were the way - I was full of energy to improve, so I dove in
- I think some of that stuff was useful, and has helped with executive function, but I don’t think it was directionally correct, after some kind of minimum viable dose. But it started me on the journey!
- I did humanistic talk therapy, it seemed to maybe do something, but not really enough, I kept searching. I tried to educate myself, I get a nonfiction book a week for a year, I got really into “learning how to learn” (which was actually useful!). This got me an insane job that 4x-d my salary, got me an insane bonus and eventually severance package that, even after giving half my net worth to my ex during our breakup, allowed me to live for ~3 years. And that job led to me discovering tpot and meeting mentors who changed my life in profound ways, etc. So, in retrospect I can just see the failures, just notice how oh god I read all those books and didn’t retain any of it, but of course it was that exact insight that got me into learning how to learn, and that let me stumble into the amazing job which unlocked so many doors
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All the ~healing stuff I’ve done