Happy Chinese New Year

Again, this time of the year. I am alone in my rental home watching a Youtube video, where the uploader is driving in the woods in the middle of the night and filming himself with his cellphone. This simple pleasure in life just makes me question the meaning of my entire existence, especially when I am temporarily free from the daily suffering for just a few days.

I just feel like my life is nonsense. Sure, doing ML and mech interp research is interesting and psychologically rewarding. But it doesn’t ensure me peace of life and mind–it just occupies the entirety of my days and totally eliminates the boundary between my work life and personal life. In the end, I just deliberately trap myself in a loop that drains my energy and makes me less pleasant and “chill”.

The cycle goes like this. I devise a project that intrigues me; I work relentlessly and in fear, trying to verify if my idea works; if the idea kind of works, I would yield a research paper as the outcome in around 2–4 months; I submit the paper to an over-crowded conference and battle with reviewers; I either get my paper accepted or revise and resubmit. Somewhere in the middle, I get bored with the current project and start working on a new project. The loop has repeated three or four times so far, and will continue for the next few years.

I sense I have become the boring nerd who doesn’t know what to chat about besides research topics. People don’t want to hang out with visibly less happy people and avoid us like a plague. To make things even more unpleasant, they try not to show it just to make themselves look like decent folks. I just hate this. I hate it that work is the only meaningful thing in my life, and I hate to be defined by my work and only my work.

There must be more to life than this.

People say you must aspire for something in order to finally achieve it. Okay, here are my fantasies:

• I want to sit in the sun at the park around my house and just stare into the distance in a trance, then I go back home and cook a tofu dish that I used to like.
• I want to adopt a kitten and raise her like my own child, hopefully she would teach me how to love myself and even another person.
• I want to go on a date and possibly fall in love or break my own heart, whatever the outcome.
• I want my friends to be just one call away and we can simply accompany one another in silence.