What is the point of college essays?
They never mention it, but it’s for a declaration of self-identity.
Identity
College Apps
College applications were 2 years ago for me, and (aside from the mental breakdown that comes from having to assess and verbalize yourself and your own future at the most flexible and thus indecisive time of your time, at least for me) I’m only now starting to see their intent.
The quintessential question– the only one that I remember and can’t quite let go yet– was “Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?”
What kind of psyche must a guy have to still be pinning for applications that happened years ago? Do you really have such regret that you can’t get over this? Kinda pathetic…
I mean, yeah, sure, but also not really; I can’t get this out of my mind because of regret, sure, but also because of that underlying doubt that under a crippling lack of self esteem I did not say that I wanted to say. No voice to cry suffering, if you will. That’s the purpose of this post.
My answers to this questions were quite basic, due to lack of self knowledge, and a lack of pride to have acted on that self knowledge.
What do I mean? I know that I had better answers, because after processing this quintessential question for a year and a half, I can finally answer it properly. Not a brush-it-off type answer or a delusional-for-acceptance type answer or a intertia-like answer that you have due to the path you are on by chance without your own will, but an answer that I choose for myself.
Why should you care? These questions, you’re not done with them. Job interviews, life direction, mid-life crisis… these questions follow you around, not because the words have beaucratic meaning– pleasuring whomever that asks– but because the answers to these questions illuminate who you yourself are.
You make your choices, and your choices make you (- Beware the Chicken). You make your answers, and then you ask the questions to see what your answers are. And if we knew so simply what our answers to these questions were, then we could approach life with such certainty that hesitations, miscalculations, and the discongruency between action and belief are eliminated. Yet I have never seen such a human being.
In other words, you question yourself to see who you yourself are. And if a person is defined by their choices, then they are, by transitivity, defined by the logic by which they choose their decisions, whether pleasure or pain. I claim that this logic is the pursuit of some goal. Some objective. That is, all decisions are made to pursue some objective– conscious (eg: I want a job) or subconscious (eg: I am horny).
With this in mind, one sees that if the choices of someone were found in aggregate and analyzed, their objectives could be laid out, and their entire personality and being encoded into a (directed acyclic) graph of goals. While I think this would be super effective and completely overlooked by institutions trying to help with future planning, the scale and difficulty of verbalization of this graph mean its too large to fit into an essay. Or people weren’t creative enough to convey their intentions in such specific wording. Who knows.
Aside: Putting this into practice is a side-project of mine
Losing track of time
Whatever the case, this is why the quintessential question of losing track of time sticks to me– how better to voice this than asking for when your choice aligns with your goal-hierarchy so much that you subconsciously lose track of time?
Then, this question isn’t really asking for when you lose track of time– I mean, people certainly lose track of time all the time: when they’re exhausted to the point of sleep, when they find their own means of escape (alcohol, drugs, porn, video games, literature, talking), entertainment (videos, shorts, televised stuff), etc.
No, its asking for how your actions align with your objectives, and the extent by which they align– measured by the extent you lose track of time.
(In mathematics, we call this a “projection”.)
And since your objectives define who you are, the question is really asking for the extent that you know who you are, and the extent that you actually act on it. How many people can really answer this truthfully? Because if we really could act on a perfect knowledge of ourselves, I feel like this world would be a much more beautiful place.
Aside: Note that human identities contain that which we like to show off, and that which we like to hide– flaws, weaknesses of biology. Since this question has a setting that is public, naturally, we want to show off. In this case, showing off means how we spend time in a way beneficial to us. Thinking about the definition of “beneficial”, I have found that a good measure of this is “sustainability” – how well we can keep doing that thing we do if we do it now. This is a whole other topic on its own; I digress.
Story
Nonetheless… A while ago, I saw advice for job interviews– people want a “story”, not a “answer”. And this prompted me to write this post for those that might have been like me: confused, but with this itch in the back of my mind knowing that there is a pattern yet unable to clearly say what it is.
This itch is story. Your answers form words, and people listen to answers not to hear these story-syllables but to hear the story holistically– what self (derived from the objectives you say) are you saying you are, and are you really behaving (actions made from your decisions) for this self?
This is the unmentioned root of behavioral questions, seen in not just employeers but also family, friends, and people curious about your life.
And with this in mind, I can actually give an answer that I wanted to give before but lacked the mouth to do so and finally put this matter to rest.
Who I am
Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
By: Richard Li
Automation. I did not know it at the time, but this would be what I would be betting my life on.
I was always more interested in the processes behind things than the things themselves. To me, this was, and is, the secret difference between one thing and innumerably many of that thing.
For example:
Why should I solve this puzzle, when I can create an algorithm to solve all such puzzles? This is what I did for my middle school boggle competition, much to the eexasperation of my english class
Why should I do this manually, when I can, unironically, spend ten times the effort automating this process? And then get one hundred times the returns? This was me creating an automatic pdf flashcard generation system for >5000 chinese HSK words
Why should I learn how to play this song, when I could be learning how to make any song? So, my passion for the physical act of playing them faded, and an interest in music theory began.
I feel as though my love for automation was supplemented by my hatred for dull labor, to the point where these sit diametrically opposed on my like-dislike axis, and, consequenty, the amount of time I am willing to invest or tolerate on my work.
I’m fine spending days making the perfect pomodoro timer mp4, or years optimizing a task generation system in Obsidian, but I feel the onset of crippling boredom when I had to work a 3-8 minimum wage service worker job, when these things, viewed from a utilitarian standpoint, bring similar rate of returns.
Perhaps, I see that all human progress has been sustained by better and better forms of automation. Perhaps, I simply hate dull work so much I am willing to lose all my time obsessively automating it all away. Perhaps, I am driven by this hype in artifical intelligence since I can see how it will all shatter and the whole image I want to make from these broken shards.
For what better automation is there than the automation of automation– the quantization of cognition and the application of systems that can further extend what humanity defines itself as, what I say that I am?
To this end, I am willing to devote my life to. Each goal, an optimal substructure to realize this ambition. Each action, a movement calculated to maximize progress towards avoiding these dull parts, even if it’s driven only by an time-wasting infatuation with never having to waste time. And each result and sub-result, discarded if it was a squandered time, obsessively pursued if the time spent advanced my path towards the automation of automation.
There is one thing that drives our choices, and that is our goal. And what better goal for automation is there than the automation of automation: the automatic learning, the automatic thinking, and the automatic response– the recursively improving artificial intelligence, the technological Singularity?
This is the mission of my life; this is the idea I find so engaging, so captivating, that I am willing to lose track of my entire lifespan to develop, sustain, and mature. And this is a bet I am willing to go all in on.
And I’d say that my odds are in my favour.
In this infinitely positive sum game, join me, and we can make something great together.