This weekend I went camping with some friends, which was very nice. Taking some time away from work and normal scheduling can be a very productive thing, I think. It's good to step back from stuff, re-evaluate priorities, etc. from time to time. In the future, I'll make it more of a point to do this intentionally and regularly. ¹

Nerd thinking

One thing I've been reminded of a lot about over the past few years especially is that it is important to "hang out" and loiter sometimes. This is related to the topic of not being a bugman. ²

What is a good use of time? Nerds jump to optimize something, and in doing so often miss "the big picture". For example, one could go to school and focus almost solely on getting good grades. In some parts of my life I have done this—luckily I was distracted enough to have fun drawing some pictures and making some friends in grade school.

By blocking out social interactions and focusing on just a few things (like studying for an exam), one can potentially work much more efficiently. This is why I think it is OK to do this a lot of the time. However, doing this all of the time is no good because what could end up happening is that one squanders their time on stupid goals OR misses out on valuable opportunities elsewhere.

Kinda Succeeding

Sometimes, the aforementioned behavior is kind of "built into the program". For example, growing up and going to church, I found myself focused on doctrine and "what the Bible says". This is a quite Protestant/Evangelical Christianity feature, I think. Many other people who call themselves Christians do not emphasize this aspect of "practicing religion" so much. ³

In one sense, I succeeded by learning a bunch of Bible knowledge and stuff. However, in another sense, I totally "lost"; if I look at people I know who did a better job focusing on people/community rather than being a nerd, they are the ones that are happily married with families, community, etc.

Another way I tried to optimize stuff was using Spaced Repetition Systems (SRS) for language larning for a while. The problem I faced was that I would not accompany this SRS learning with enough other (more important) learning—e.g. absorbing media of my target languages. On top of this, I was studying way too many langauges at once. My over-optimization led me to be able to recognize a whole bunch of words in a whole bunch of languages but I was not well-practiced in stringing together sentences, telling jokes, singing songs, and so on in these languages.

Often times it is through networks that people get opportunities, not being the best at some narrow domain. Those with nerd tendencies (like myself) often jump to optimizing something. Combined with Bugman tendencies, one can easily squander lots and lots of time developing weird abilities and habits in all sorts of directions. This might be appropriate sometimes (e.g. a kid exploring various interests), but it is often not a good approach for getting things done in the "real world".

LARPing as a Slav in the woods with Filipinos

Going camping, it was fun to try stuff I normally wouldn't do. For starters, I don't like to deal with too much stuff when camping. I helped move all sorts of stuff, including boxing gloves and coolers filled with meat for fancy cooking. I got to throw a hatchet 😱

There were other small things such as listening to other people's music choices—a lot of the fun of music is social—we want to enjoy music with other people eventually (this is why there are things like concerts and dance parties).

Doing Better

Hanging out with people and socializing is an important thing for nerds to do. While one may be rather self-content on a day to day schedule being a nerd, failure to "sync up" with society from time to time means running the risk of becoming very "out of touch".

Beyond oneself, I think it is important to engage different people generally—whether in age/generation, nationality, etc. Only talking with people of a particular group (e.g. a gamer who only talks with gamers) can lead to a very warped perception of the world and many missed opportunities.

The arrogance of the nerd is thinking that they know better than mainstream society because they do better in some limited domain. This tendency should be tempered by humbling hang outs with other elements of society.