research

(I discovered this photo yesterday, and this has to be one of the most awe-inspiring things I’ve ever witnessed).

I told you that I was working a lot this summer, although I knew you could tell because I’d respond to you at 5:30 AM every day. “Why?” you asked.

I want to do a good job.

“What does good mean?”

I don’t know.

A few memories flicker by.

When I gave my 4th grade math teacher an AMC problem that she couldn’t solve, she said, you’re good at math, Kevin. I felt validated, because I didn’t have friends back then and didn’t have anything “cool” to show to classmates when they’d ask what I did with my free time.

When I organized a math summer camp in 10th grade, many of my kids’ parents told me, you’re so mature and put-together, Kevin. I felt proud, because no one had thought that of me before. It feels euphoric when all the adults you’ve interacted with before — namely teachers — were constantly hounding you with detention.

When I found great friends the last couple of years, I felt appreciated. I genuinely believed that my effortless presence could positively benefit the world. I felt at ease, like I didn’t need to prove anything.

It’s funny, I tell you, because I certainly don’t think I’m good at math, mature, or a good friend these days. Most days I think I am nothing at all.

“What makes you say that?” — you ask.

Despite being more fascinated by mathematically grounded ideas, I’m too scared to prove anything myself or even write down preliminary equations, because how will you know you aren’t writing in circles? Math competitions and MIT classes are safer, because I know the problem has a solution, that the roads are paved.

Half the time I don’t know how I’m feeling. When I pay attention to my body, I notice some tension in my chest and legs, but I’m not sure what it’s caused by. I don’t easily feel completely stress-free when around people. I have generally positive interactions with strangers, but I feel incompetent in closer relationships.

Typically, I trust and feel close to people pretty easily, and I believe my friends are all wonderful people I wish the best for. I also feel lonely sometimes when I (perhaps falsely) begin believing that I put more effort into a relationship than the other person, and so when my life changes a lot over the next few months, I’ll probably drift apart from many friends, and neither of us would mind.

Maybe this is why I care about my research so much, to the extent of working a hundred hours a week — because all of my flaws as a person are exacerbated through research. I can clearly see my fear of math — which stems from a fear of “wasted motion” — encourage me to ditch unlikely directions instead of methodically evaluating why experiments are failing and sticking through it.

My lack of self-awareness means that I’m often on autopilot, staring at wandb charts instead of planning out concrete next steps, or at my codebase in hesitation to commit to any kind of experiment, because that would require clear convictions, and parts of my day just feel murky.

I feel disconnected from loved friends and family because I unconsciously believe that all of them are either too preoccupied to care about me deeply, or have various emotional bottlenecks that make it difficult, or just lack the experience for their words to touch me because I don’t know how many people similar to me they’d known well in their lives. Research is lonely because I have full ownership to walk a path of ideas that no one has ever walked down.

Particularly, I believe that people often find it difficult to escape out of emotional holes, whether that is social awkwardness, anxiety, jealousy, etc. because it’s so hard to envision their joy being real. There are people I feel perfectly comfortable with, and I can mentally narrative out the jokes and stories and questions I’d tell. There are other people I feel awkward around, and just thinking about being around them makes my mind go blank. The reason I rarely feel comforted by others is because the state they wish for me to be in — what is good to them — isn’t actually what I want. In this sense, I know no one who is my age and cares about the same things I care about. Particularly, many people will tell me to put less value into the products of my work, but then I’ll feel frustrated because these same people don’t seem to care about outcomes at all (and I believe in trying to be effective), so it’s even harder to imagine my joy being real.

I care about research because it’s a medium that surfaces a lot about me. My work is a reflection of myself, one that’s impossible to taint with rosy stories and heroic motivations. I care about it because I care about myself. If I become a better researcher, I become a better person.

And, the point about joy being real holds true especially for research. All you need, other than attention, is one good idea to believe that you really can discover things that no one else can do. Heck, machine learning has only seen a few good ideas in the last decade. That’s the unconscious narrative I tell myself, I say.

“What are the parts of yourself that you’re the most ashamed of, when you do research?”

I’m not sure. I feel embarrassed when I look at my peers — who have published papers that were accepted at reviewed conferences — and also have just gotten into the field. I feel a sinking feeling in my stomach, like I’m wasting such an amazing opportunity; I worry that I’m unable to see projects through to completion and give up too easily. I’ll start post-hoc justifying how they were lucky or more advantaged than me, or how their research isn’t that impressive anyways. It’s a reliable coping mechanism because I’m quite good at creating logical justifications for anything.

I’m embarrassed about my inability to code. Objectively this is false: I finished all the labs for distributed systems without help last semester, which means that I probably can do any engineering-related task I wanted. But, it’s easier to look at my coworkers or other friends who can write kernels and distributed training pipelines, which are legible skills, whereas I’ve learned … what exactly the past week? The past month?

I feel ashamed about my inability to communicate. I’m emotionally invested in my ideas even though I shouldn’t be, so it’s a lot easier to think about why they are exciting than to rigorously write down fool-proof experiments, so I end up wasting a lot of time when they fail for reasons I overlook. I feel stupid for being unable to process my ideas rationally, and I feel guilty for wasting so much time because of this.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to work hard. I waste time really easily, and I am fortunate to have many interests, so I want to be able to experience as much of the world as I can. I feel incompetent when I can’t focus, and I compensate for that by spending more time in the office.

“What bad thing will happen if you stop working?”

On research? Not much. I can see myself having a much healthier work-life balance if I wanted to.

“No, more generally. On yourself.”

Hmm… I guess that above all, I fear not trying. Almost all of my friends tell me to stop working as hard, but how will I grow as a person if I run away, instead of towards my flaws?

Once, I showed a friend a video of an interview with a therapist that claimed to only be sad for five minutes a week. My friend commented that they didn’t believe him; I saw that video and read his entire blog later that day. For some reason, I’m more optimistic than possibly all of my friends. I don’t believe the world is just the way it is, that people are just the way they are, that I am just the way I am. The idea feels existentially uncomfortable with me.

“Why do you feel uneasy if that were true?”

I’m not sure. I can point to my relationships with family, or maybe the pain of seeing friends suffer from the same preventable things over and over again. Maybe I feel that those around me would be so much more effective in making me and others feel loved if they reflected a little more, and I want to inspire that in the world.

But, it’s also true that I’m not yet nineteen and a half and I already have everything that me two years ago wanted in life and much more. What if nothing changed? I would be happy regardless.

Sometimes, saying that out loud doesn’t feel true though, I tell you. I do deeply believe that I can be happy no matter where I end up, but what about those painful cycles of anger and fear and helplessness that will inevitably pop up?

“They will pop up. What about then?”

I would feel like I wasted my time, if I suffered and learned nothing from it. That feels existentially scary to me. I want to learn from everything because otherwise I feel… like I’m missing out? On what, I’m not sure.

Or, in some weird way, I’m almost incentivized to create and solve problems that don’t necessarily exist because I then get the satisfaction of feeling productive, or possibly because I avoid the fear that arises from helplessness. This is also why I dislike reading my previous writing or my journal; I cringe at it, but that discomfort partly stems from realizing that I haven’t overcome the things I wish I had.

All four of the things that cause me to feel stressed by research stem from a feeling of “behind-ness with myself”, an ideal version of myself. Internalizing that this ideal version of myself doesn’t exist would help, which is why I try to be as open as I can these days. More importantly, I’d like to remember that “overcoming” feelings doesn’t make sense because feelings are like weather; you don’t overcome a snowy day, you just make snowmen (or women or angels, idk).

“Thank you for your questions and patience, by the way. I feel a lot lighter now. This was quite clarifying.” I say with a smile.

“The other advice I’d give is that you’d do well with making your research and growth fun. For example, I imagine writing fiction is fun for you. You told me a whole host of fun things you wanted to do with friends; a lot of them were project-related. You should explicitly tell me what doing research and growing as a person in a fun way looks like.”

Hmm… sometimes I enjoy reading papers, but they can also feel like a slog with overly verbose word choice. I don’t enjoy reading papers when they’re large swathes of text that I need to pass through ChatGPT over and over again.

• I can make this fun by teaching someone else, or even just asking a co-worker if they want to listen to me explain a paper to them.

Usually, I wake up quite motivated to run experiments, but after the first batch fails, I progressively lose more and more motivation and begin staring at wandb charts. Chunking my work time into blocks has helped, but doesn’t address the emotional attachment to positive results.

• For every experiment I run, I want to log a guess for a “failure mode”, which will force me to feel prepared no matter what happens. I suspect a big reason why I yearn for experiments to work is because I’m a lot more ready for the best-case than the worst-case.

I’m almost pathologically scared of rigor and math, and I’m not sure why; this is also why I procrastinate full write-ups or rigorous codebase reviews. Part of it might be because I feel stressed by self-imposed deadlines, and part of it might be because as an optimist, incomplete ideas always feel more attractive than complete ones, because then I need to deal with all the ways they don’t work.

• I think the deadlines and exposure therapy is the main issue; deep down, I do want a more rigorous understanding. I will block myself off from starting anything new after this internship until I concretely write up everything I’ve learned, both this summer and the past school year. I’ll also get back into doing a couple of difficult math olympiad problems, so I regain familiarity with proofs.

It’s also worth paying attention to why I’m not being fully relaxed at the office; I think it’s usually downstream of some work-related stressor, combined with possibly anxiety about being inept or unknowledgeable.

The next time I feel anxiety about not learning as much as I could’ve, I’ll concretely write down what I wanted to learn but can’t that is making me feel like I’m behind, so I stop hiding behind nebulous statements.

• I want to make one of those really pretty study guides that some people in my high school made every few days to explain and summarize my learnings.

I love research because the world is foremost beautiful, and that includes things that have not been discovered. How can I look at the night sky and not want to throw myself at the world, to experience everything there is to it without need or fear? I want to remember that I work because of beauty.

• I will journal down all the beautiful things I learn every day, whether from myself or from others.

• Related to this, I will journal gratitudes every day.

The next time I feel overwhelmed by feeling the need to get better, I will create some art form with it. There is no better in art, but it always changes; in this sense, I want to remember that there is no better Kevin, just one that flows downstream of nature, and I can embrace that.

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I should probably clarify that these posts are fake. The reason I write these are because, like I mentioned before, I do not know personally know anyone who is striving for my ideals under the age of thirty, so it’s quite hard to find hope when I feel dejected sometimes. Maybe, someday I will meet someone

The push-ups story gave me the lasting conviction to do the push-ups, which made me feel hopeful, so I’m trying to use fictional conversations as a medium for me to believe that the self I strive for is genuinely real. (Also, I am not usually this sad, intense, or weird :P)