Nikita Khutorni's Site

I am feeling fear and doubt creep up again. My friend is not picking up. I did not answer him when he sent me a message today. I feel uncertain.

I felt incredibly tired before 2pm and before I had around 200mg of caffeine.

I actually worked pretty well today. I formulated the Bachelor project proposal. I was working on the Bachelor thesis proposal and then I realised that this thesis doesn’t make sense. The questions I would be answering are too loose and their volume does not justify a standalone scientific paper. I don’t think that I can pose a good enough question in the thesis. I already have a good research question in the project proposal but the thesis has to be as independent from the project. When I realized this, I again remembered Psyberlab. Psyberlab is a working group at my university. They are “investigating human-computer interaction, machine learning, and cognitive psychology toward amplifying human intelligence.”

One subdivision of their work is reasoning, where they track people using different sensors and apply techniques that create changes in habits. This is very close to what I actually want to do in my life. I knew about Psyberlab before, at least a year ago. I told everybody that I wanted to do that. But after seeing the director of the group, Shoya Ishimaru, with his endless list of accomplishments, an invisible voice in my head grew and stayed there until today. “You are not enough. You don’t have the necessary accomplishments yet to join them. You are too dumb for this group.” The voice was invisible because I forgot it was there, and when I found a group for my thesis, I had a good reason to let this voice be — after all, I now had a spot at a great place, what else could I wish for? — The voice was there but I had an excuse for its presence — it would be ungrateful to explore other opportunities, after all.

Until today. Until, in the past few days, I realized that I know what I want to do. Until I realized that I have to act to get what I want, and that it won’t be comfortable.

So, I am acting now. I will write an email to Shoya Ishimaru. I want to join his group. I want to focus on the endless chatter in people’s heads. I want to use tech to help the millions caught in invisibly destructive habits of mind get out of their prison.

I say to myself that I need to look better on paper when I send the invitation. Share my goals & desire and acomplishments online, here and on social media — LinkedIn, Twitter. I have said to myself for months that I need to wait, wait for … reasons! But in reality, I did not understand what I want. And even if I understood, I was too afraid of the public opinion to say it out loud.

But again, now I see that it is time to get what I want. I see more and more of the thought traps I put myself in. All the assumptions I made that made me sit comfortably in my place. Comfortably denying myself all opportunities. It ends here, today. I certainly will fall back to the terrible place I was 3 weeks ago. But I accept it. It’s about how quickly you can go back up. And my goal is to captivate the experience and the methods that helped me, here; and I am certain that they will be of use to my future self and you dear reader, to get back up on track.

I am catching my doubts. Anthony Metiever proposes a simple and incredibly powerful technique — two questions to ask yourself, whenever you catch yourself getting stuck in the thought loop:

Are your thoughts useful?
How do they behave?

Repeat this and you will quiet the chatter down.

I read somewhere that using “I” predominantly in writing is an indicator for narcissism. I am constanly using “I”, but I really don’t think that I am narcissistic. And does it still apply when you are writing an introspective blog? You decide.