fuck

fuck

I am trying to catalogue my own anger

I am in roughly the same amount of pain today as I ever am

Today I woke up at 2am and at 4am and I got out of bed at 6am

I was walking my dog and the anger did not go away. In my mind was “fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou …” directed either at myself or at everything but myself. What’s the difference?

I started crying suddenly and unexpectedly and as I type this I am starting again

Every morning I spend a lot of time reading, I usually get a lot of peace and pleasure from this. Not today.

I guess in general I’m having a hard time getting immersed in the reading like I normally do. I am impatient and anhedonic. I demand things I haven’t even given myself the time or space to grasp, then I get angry when my demand is not met.

I am feeling a distinct sense of anger at not understanding/comprehending the reading I am doing. Anger is not the appropriate response to this, but for the sake of argument let’s imagine that it is.

The anger must be directed either at the author for not writing clearly enough, or at myself for not reading robustly enough, and/or for letting my emotions own me so completely.

What if it’s “justly” directed at the author? Well, there exist more books in the world than I will ever have time to read, and I chose to read this one. A strange sense of entitlement would have to be the origin of this sort of anger. I would have to feel as if I were entitled to understand and enjoy the book…. why? I know why. These are famous books, scientific canon. There is a cloud of intellectual prestige which engulfs this book, and maybe I feel I’m being excluded from the cloud, and maybe this makes me angry. Yet this anger cannot be justified, because the sense of entitlement it springs from cannot be justified.

I see Cain and Abel here. Cain is deemed less worthy of love and honor, he doesn’t understand why. In terms of how a human being reacts to this, there is a fork in the road. One path is the path of frustration, envy, and loathing which Cain took canonically in murdering Abel. The other path is the one of solemn and earnest investigation, of humility and acceptance and willingness to grow and change and acknowledge your own faults and shortcomings. The most important aspect of free will is our ability to choose between these paths. At the end of one path is dissonance, at the end of the other is integration. Nobody learns or grows much while trying to squint through this fog of dissonance.

Ok fine, but what if it’s “justly” directed at myself? Well, I think we have seen so far that to blame to author is just a roundabout way of blaming myself. So really if I’m getting angry at a book, I am always blaming myself in one form or another. So if it’s always directed at myself, the remaining question is whether I am justified in being angry at myself for my lack of comprehension. This seems to me like an exhausting and useless question, the wrong question to ask.

A note: if there is a graphical representation of something on the page, I tend to frustrate myself by trying to interpret it before I have actually read the verbal explanation of what I am looking at. It’s somewhat funny and absurd that I do this repeatedly even though I have an awareness of my tendency to do so.

I will try a new approach, I will retrace my steps from earlier and see where and how my anger flares. Retracing my steps:

Feynman is trying to teach me about the law of the conservation of energy. I think I am in a precarious situation here from the very start, because I have a preconcieved notion that I understand this law, and on some level I do understand it. Will this pre-existing understanding help me or hinder me in reading Feynman’s explanation? So far I get the impression that it hinders me.

Ok so, energy is conserved in a closed system. Feynman asks us to imagine a “weight-lifting machine”. This is like a seesaw, or a lever sitting on a fulcrum. On the right end of the seesaw is a one pound block, on the left end we have three one pound blocks. The left end, being dragged down by gravity, lifts up the weight on the right end.

Ok I’m already pissed.

Listen to him describe the same machine I just described. He says:

“This machine lifts weights three units “strong”.” WHAT THE FUCK DOES “STRONG” MEAN??????? YOU CAN’T JUST DO THAT. DOES IT MEAN “HEAVY”?

Directly after that sentence, here’s this bullshit:

“We place three units on one balance pan, and one unit on the other. However, in order to get it to actually work, we must lift a little weight off the left pan. On the other hand, we could lift a one-unit weight by lowering the three-unit weight, if we cheat a little by lifting a little weight off the other pan.”

This makes me want to blow my fucking head off.

“In order to get it to actually work, we must lift a little weight off the left pan” WHAT THE FUCK?????? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? WHAT IS IT “TO WORK”? WHAT HAPPENS AFTER WE LIFT A LITTLE WEIGHT OFF THE LEFT AND WHY?? FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU

“… we could lift a one-weight unit by lowering the three-weight unit …” Yes. Yes we could, you’re right about that

“… if we cheat a little by lifting a little weight off the other pan.” JSDBADGSOIGNSBGFUIEBFABUIGSNGSLKFJGKFJKKFGNTJKHBNSDFNIJSDOIASVNKJDSDGISR

This is fucking unbearable. The “other pan”?? Hey cunt, you forgot to tell us which pan is the first pan. What do you mean we need to “cheat a little” to make gravity work the way it always works?

It goes on like that for many pages, and it makes me unbelievably upset to read. The reason it upsets me so much is: it makes me feel like I am failing to grasp basic English sentences (because I am). I know that I know English perfectly well, and I also know that Richard Feynman is widely considered one of the greatest physics teachers in modern history. So, like, what the fuck dude?

How is he possibly making something as simple as a seesaw this convoluted and unclear? One of us is at fault, either me or Feynman, this is an unavoidable conclusion. I have no doubts that he is a better physicist than I am, but I am seriously puzzled by his fame as a writer and communicator. I am now tempted to look for others who have had a similar experience with this passage. Why am I tempted to do this? Because it allows me to blame Feynman instead of myself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/ovu246/going_through_the_feynman_lectures_and_very/

Here is someone in the exact same boat as I am. I am not a physics person, all the physics teachers and professors I’ve had in my life were disappointments to me. I would love to better understand physics, I am interested in physics and I feel I am capable of at least a shallow understanding of physical laws. And I suppose, if this reddit person’s perspective holds water, my mistake was expecting to be able to grasp Feynman with my nonexistent level of expertise/experience in physics.

So my expectations were not well aligned with reality, and this was the cause of my rage and my confusion. I expected Feynman to be writing this for ME, but he is writing this for someone with an actual physics background. This information frees me from my self-loathing. Sorry for calling you a cunt Richard.

I could give up on reading the lectures, but I’d really rather just shift my approach to one that will be more pleasant, because my interest in physics has not gone anywhere. So instead of a comprehensive and intense reading, I will opt for more of a pleasure-oriented armchair sort of reading. Reading it this way, I will actually end up learning MORE than if I tried to read it too intensely. I will still only learn like 10% of what the book has to offer, I’ll skip around and miss things and misunderstand things. This is a much more emergent approach to the lectures - I will not decide a priori that what this book has to teach me is contained in the book. No, what the book has to teach me is contained in the space in between me and the book.