Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing. You have to know, not fear, but know that someday you're going to die.
Hello friends!
If I had more time I would've written a shorter letter.Blaise Pascal said that. It is absolutely true, and today's post is gonna be absolutely long.
I didn't spend much time refining it because I wanted to share the transformative experiences I had in the most authentic and accurate way possible (and I didn't have much time in the first place). Enjoy.
📸 Coffee naps and Film Photography
I never liked the taste of coffee, and its effects never worked on me (I've probably never drank a real and good coffee anyway). Though, when I discovered the idea of coffee naps1, I decided I wanted to try it.
It consists of drinking coffee, then taking a 20 minutes nap right afterward, and getting back to work.
The theory is simple:
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there's a molecule called adenosine that plugs into little receptors inside your brain and makes you feel tired
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adenosine is a product of brain activity, so it builds up throughout the day and slows down your neurons
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caffeine chemically looks a whole lot like adenosine, and when you ingest caffeine and it enters your brain, it blocks adenosine from fitting into those receptors.
The thing about coffee naps is: sleep naturally clears out adenosine from the brain! So the caffeine doesn't even need to compete with the adenosine to fit into those receptors. It takes around 20 minutes for the caffeine to kick in, so take a nap in those 20 minutes, and boom!
My experience and the context around it made it even better than expected. I don't know exactly why, so I'm gonna share many details.
At 3 PM I worked out and took a shower. After a couple of weeks of the most intense workouts of my life, I'm not achieving much intensity these days, but I'm still moving.
At 4 PM I drank cold coffee. It was in the fridge as mum made it yesterday and it was left over. Then
- I closed all the windows,
- put my headphones on,
- played Avril 14th's radio2 on Spotify (background songs I frequently use when I deep focus, so I'm familiar with them and subconsciously associate them3 to that flowing state4),
- and laid down on my bed.
THE BEST 20 MINUTES OF THE DAY.
During those 20 minutes, I just forgot about everything and didn't care about anything. Thoughts still ran in my mind, but I just didn't give a shit about any of them, maybe because I knew I was preparing to get my hands dirty on something that really matters to me, so everything else lost perceived value.
After the first 10 minutes, when the caffeine started to slowly kick in, I just started to feel weird and got lost in the music, almost as people describe when they're on drugs, and I loved that feeling! (I'm not going to get drugs don't worry haha, I'm long-term minded) At 4:20 PM (I promise it's just a coincidence) I "woke up" with a no-sound vibration-only alarm, from the same device that was playing the music in my headphones, so the music stopped too. It was graceful. I reopened the windows, refilled my water bottle, grateful for the pleasurable deep meditative minutes I had just gone through, and started working. The fact that I was already playing my deep-focus music during the nap made it seamless and mystical!
For more than 3 hours I was unstoppable.
I already knew what I had to work on before the coffee nap, so I didn't lose energy figuring out what to deep focus on, and my phone was turned off in a drawer. These are important details.
I don't use the Pomodoro technique or anything, but a similar rhythmic pattern just appeared in my workflow.
I worked on two things:
- the Swift compiler
- a simple app I'm building.
An incremental build of the Swift compiler takes around 20 minutes on my little laptop - in other words, every time I make changes to the code and I want to run it to see if it does what I want it to do, I have to wait around 20 minutes. So what happens is that I focus, try to understand how the code works, and tweak it "by visualization" as much as I can, but when I'm stuck or confident that the code is correct (fun fact: usually the most confident I am, the less correct the code ends up to be), I can't make more progress but to compile and test it. This usually lasts only as long as 5/10 minutes, I'm a practical programmer, I RUN my code, not hypothesize what it would do in my head. Maybe I could do better at visualizing before running, people say Einstein's success was due to his visualizing skill, but it's just how I am right now. Working on the compiler with this workflow and limitations is obviously changing me for the better on that matter.
While the compiler was compiling (how cool does that sound!), I worked on a simple app I'm building.
Jumping back and forth from the two projects every 10/20 minutes surprisingly didn't kill my flow state. Actually, the development of the app is a very active process in which I almost never have to wait for the computer to build things, so if I only did that, I would have to remind myself to do some breaks, or otherwise, I could stay there iterating forever, dealing with the diminishing energy problem that the Pomodoro techniques seem to solve. But I didn't need to! Actually, having to wait for the other program to compile to see my changes in action, made me very curious and excited about it, and when I saw them, it was very gratifying in every scenario. When the code was correct, there's no need for explanations of why it was satisfying. And also when it was not correct, it was gratifying because it gave me hints about which parts of the code to think about, it "unstuck" me.
This idea of delayed gratification is something I'm valuing more and more.
The other day I rewatched Fight Club5 for the nth time, and I love the philosophy behind that movie more every time I rewatch it! I think it's my favorite movie ever.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.Everything about living in the modern world is easy. Sometimes life is too comfortable to be meaningful or enjoyable. It's the age of abundance. 6 This has led to a generation of people who for the first time in history have access to a life where they can live purposelessly:
- Watch 5 hours of TV a day to satisfy their desire for entertainment and human connection
- Use porn to satisfy their sexual desires
- Eat cheap junk food to satisfy their tongue and stomach and face no immediate consequences.
I searched for "film photography" on youtube, and the next thing I know is a package full of 35mm film rolls waiting for me.
We're used to taking pictures with our phones these days, which is the opposite: ordinary, inexpensive, and instantaneous.
You can probably get a good SLR camera and lens for as cheap as 50€ (and you may find your dad's old one in your garage for free anyway). But then the film rolls will cost you around 1€ per shot. How many pictures do you have in the gallery of your phone? Imagine if you had to pay 1€ for each of them. So, when you take a picture on film, you care about it, it must be special and mean something to you.
It's only once you've finished with your roll (usually after 24 or 36 shots), that you take it out and proceed to the next step, the development. Furthermore, if you don't develop the film yourself and give it to a professional laboratory instead (and this is probably what you'll do at least for the beginning months of your film photography journey), it will take 3-7 days before you'll finally see your pictures.
Imagine the curiosity and surprise involved in the process! Then, look at a couple of film photos: I don't know what is it about them, but they just look so different, are so beautiful, and feel so nostalgic. The colors, the grain, the imperfections, the process. It's just magic.
The generalized idea is true for relationships too. We appreciate our pictures more when we have to wait and work and make an effort for them (e.g. film photography) rather than when we passively take them out of habit and don't care too much about them (e.g. casually getting our phone out of our pocket and shooting a random picture of a moment). Similarly, we think we want a partner who will make us happy, but we really want is someone who's capable of making us suffer in pleasurable ways that feel somehow familiar to us.
