Who I want to be
I'm Alek. Here's what I want that to mean:
- I want the quality-weighted quantity of great experience-moments in the universe to be large; I want to contribute to making it larger.
- I want to love and be loved by a partner with whom I share my life. I describe what this means elsewhere (will link later).
- I want to do what is right, even when it's awkward, scary, or inconvenient. For instance, I want to be honest. Some of my biggest regrets in life all stem from ignoring cognitive dissonance for far too long. I can't change these mistakes, but I can at least listen to dissonance when I hear it now.
- I want to be kind, caring, considerate, empathetic, and forgiving. For instance, I want to be happy to help people move, or to make ginger tea for my friend when their stomach is upset.
- I want to be good at handling situations where I've hurt someone I care about. Specifically, I want to straightforwardly apologize, I want to understand how they are feeling, and I want to try to make reparations.
- I want to relish life. To take immense pleasure in simple happenings, such as silly callbacks and jokes, or a dash of good fortune. To enjoy pleasant physical sensations: the wind and ocean spray on my face at the beach, a transcendent sunset, tasty food (Imm Thai yellow curry is currently my favorite food), nice temperatures, a weighted blanket. To appreciate the people around me, and shared experiences with them. To be sincere, passionate and excited about life.
- I want to be rational in pursuit of my goals, and to have good epistemics.
- I want to do good work. To be thoughtful and agentic when deciding what to work on, and to diligently execute on my chosen work. Recently, I'm proud of working on an agreement to avoid a particularly scary type of AI architecture.
- I want to pursue intellectual curiosity. To ask questions about life, math, ethics, and how the world works. To read other people's thoughts on this, and talk or write my way into answers.
- I want to write. Sometimes poetically processing life events and questions into meaning and clarity. Sometimes answering a practical question about how best to live ones' life. Sometimes writing something playful. Sometimes as a way of communicating to someone in a higher bandwidth manner (I love writing and receiving emails!).
- I want to have idiosyncrasies. Fun traditions, interesting sayings. (I'm pretty good at coming up with memetically fit phrases).
- I want to engage in fun activities: karaoke (I'm a big c-pop fan), going to the beach (favorite beach: Albany), hiking (favorite place: Stonewall-Panoramic Trail), looking at the stars, traveling, chatting, doing math. Weirder activities.
- I want to have deeply meaningful social connections with others. To hear the stories they want to tell, and appreciate awesome or quirky aspects of other people. To support others when I can (for instance, I love talking about hard decisions that people need to make, or things that are stressing them out).