What progress did I make in 2021?

It is New Year’s Eve 2021 and I am sitting alone in my room because the party I wanted to go to was cancelled due to Covid. Has there ever been a better time to sit back and reflect?

Coding & Foosball

I spent the second part of the year on a research project and learned a lot. Even though the overall results are not expected to be great, I now know my way around pandas and scikit-learn and have basic knowledge in pytorch. My fear of Deep Learning is gone, it didn’t turn out to be that scary after all. Moreover, I learned that how much I enjoy being in the office depends to a large degree on the caliber of my coworkers. I had the pleasure of working with some extraordinary people this year, extremely bright but also fun and confident in their nerdiness. I realized that I don’t work that hard compared to others but that even the people who make it on the front page of journals are humans after all (and they are good at Foosball). In hindsight, my plan to choose projects over classes paid back 100%.

Exercise & Diet

It wasn’t a great year workout-wise but not as terrible as 2021. After the restrictions loosened in the summer, I was able to go back to the gym and even though I have not yet made a lot of progress, I realized how much I had missed feeling the iron bar pressing against my skin. Additionally, I bought some running shoes (see Literature Review - Minimalist Footwear and managed to hit the pavement regularly. The country where I currently live gets incredibly dark and cold in the winter, so I was not able to run in the last couple of weeks, but I am really looking forward to the summer. I have started to enjoy running and I believe the main reason is that I am doing it alone. When running with others they tend to go faster than me and make it really exhausting for me to keep up with them, which led to me developing an aversion towards the whole topic (I am too proud to tell them to slow it down). Running alone, I might not be breaking any speed records, but it enables me to run at all and I don’t hate myself afterwards. This year, I started tracking how much meat I ate, which turned out to be almost none. I did it five times, all of which was meat that might be thrown away otherwise. For some reason, my self-control in regards to snacking improved massively this year. Usually, I avoid having to use willpower by not buying sweets, but when I visit my family I lose all inhibitions. This time, I still got weak from time to time, but I didn’t stuff myself.

Reading

(some spoilers in this section)

I read some books this year, even though the overall tally was less than what I had hoped. I recorded how long on spent on each individual book (this includes some that were started in 2020) and some of these are shown below.

What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami
I purchased this book in order to motivate me to run more. This was quite effective because the book was so boring that I spent less time reading and more time doing other stuff. Usually, I like Murakami’s works but this one I couldn’t even finish.

Of mice and men - Book review
Notes on SLEEP A Very Short Introduction

The Peregrine by J.A. Baker
In his famous paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” philosopher Thomas Nagel wonders what an animal feels from the inside and comes to the conclusion that the subjective character of the experience is inaccessible to us. The protagonist of The Peregrine, nevertheless, makes an impressive attempt to solve this problem in regards to a falcon. Following the animals over months, the reader witnesses every flicker of the majestic wings and gets absorbed in the world of feathered bipeds. Baker’s prose is phenomenal but not cheerful.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with The Sea by Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima was a many-faceted personality: author, model, poet, nationalist, militiaman and one of the last publicly known cases of Seppuku (ritual suicide) in Japan. His novel is a mixture of aesthetic study and philosophical fairy tale, neither of which I liked particularly well.

The Hobbit & The two Towers & The Return of the King & The Silmarillion by J.R.R Tolkien
Before I dove into the Tolkien universe, I didn’t really like fantasy. Last summer, I had tried reading “Anathem” and found it mind-numbingly boring, the story was too far removed from my daily life experiences to be meaningful. With The Lord of the Rings, I felt different. Tolkien takes the reader on a beautiful journey through a land that once was and does not neglect the backstory at all. In fact, the thing that makes the LOTR so good is an all-encompassing mythology in which the journey of the Fellowship is only of minor significance. It seems that Tolkien could as well have chosen another time and place and written a story just as complete. I can recommend these books to all readers who want to immerse themselves in a strange world or are just looking for some escapism on a rainy day.

Consider the Lobster: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace
This collection contains a number of essays by esteemed American Writer D.F. Wallace, varying in length as well as in quality. In my opinion, the best one is the one that lends its name to the title of the book. An essay that was commissioned by Gourmet magazine sends the author to the Maine Lobster Festival. Surprisingly little time is spent on making lobster palatable to the reader, instead, the article focuses on the ethical problem around boiling possibly sentient beings alive. A read that was probably intended by the magazine to provoke saliva production in the reader only manages to stir thoughts.

Book review A Short History of Ancient Greece

Gedanken zu Marcus Aurelius’ Selbstbetrachtungen

Dune by Frank Herbert
After finishing LOTR, I was really hyped to get started on another fantasy book. Dune seemed like a safe choice because it has rich lore and is considered a classic of sci-fi. Nevertheless, the story did not capture me and I walked away early. Nothing matches Tolkien. It is insane (but maybe not illogical) to think that arguably the best work of fantasy ever created was written by an English academic linguist.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
What is it that prompts humans to climb up the highest mountains in the world, to go where the air lacks oxygen and no helicopter can land? After reading Krakauer’s book, I can only conclude that the answer is masochism and a lack of healthy self-preservation instincts. The story chronicles the 1997 Everest disaster which follows a group of adventurers up the highest mountain in the world (from the word “disaster” you can tell deduce that it doesn’t end well). The expedition members freeze, get sick, go hungry, get injured and spend massive amounts of money and for what? To spend 2 minutes standing in the top wondering what color your toes have right now? (This review was sponsored by the Association of the Bavarian tourism industry*)

Writing

Starting this blog was easily one of the best decisions of the year. Not only did it help me make decisions, but it proved to be a good outlet for all kinds of thoughts and ideas.

Here is a list of all my posts in 2021:

Most of the articles are random, others concern topics which I thought about a lot this year. The insect posts reflect my concern about the ethics of factory farming and explores if it would be more ethical to switch to insect protein. I am looking forward to diving more into animal ethics in the future.

New stuff I tried out

Due to the Covid situation, I wasn’t able to go out as much as I had wanted to. Nevertheless, I did some exciting new things. I got involved with an Engineering society, I started bouldering and I learned what an RPG is. The last one was a totally new concept to me and I hope it gets me through the next months (years?) of pandemic restrictions.

Plans for 2022

My biggest commitment of the year is to do more biohacking experiments. Lifestyle changes like meditation or changing sleep patterns are easy to try out and have huge potential upsides. There are a couple of posts I want to get out. One on willpower is almost finished, another one on “rational” exercise might take a long time. To improve my writing, I bought Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style which I am looking forward to. I am still very slow and inefficient while writing, especially on posts with lots of references and I will try to experiment with ways to improve this without compromising accuracy. I also want to read more philosophy, especially ethics. Peter Singer is next on my radar. In regards to exercise, I want to start doing it more regularly.

• No, it wasn’t