immortality / incrementing
Jeff was watching Groundhog Day on TV and I joined him. I haven't thought about it in a while, but that movie had a profound effect on me when I first saw it.

Immortality is often presented as a curse in, y'know, vampire stories or science fiction but the answer always seemed apparent to me: with infinite time comes infinite opportunity to learn. To my younger self, Groundhog Day showed that someone else got it; after some false starts, Bill Murray's character uses his neverending day to learn ice sculpture and to play piano and the story ends happily.

The life span we have isn't infinite but it might as well be. We've time to spare: any time you've been bored has been time you weren't using. Armed with this attitude, I picked goals -- the more physically monotonous, the better. Eight hours of German classes a day in Munich? I grabbed a coin and taught myself to flip it over the backs of my fingers, practicing for hours each day. Juggling looks hard? Sure, good jugglers likely have something normal humans don't, but it's more a question of perseverance. You throw the balls in the air enough times and the muscle memory builds. I aimed for Rubenstein's Revenge* because I read it was the hardest three-ball trick, and I eventually got it.

But now that I see the movie again as an "adult", I can see that I missed the point. Learning to play the piano and making ice sculptures were just aspects of becoming a better person, and the real happiness came from...

...getting the girl. (It was a romantic comedy, after all.)


Learning to program eventually killed the joy of a whole class of computer games for me. In the old arcade games, like Centipede, it was always about high score, but in today's games -- I think of Diablo as a prime example -- high score has become disguised under other names. These games must tap into some animal drive for progress for they addict all sorts of people despite the game revolving around making numbers increment. I've written code that increments numbers too many times already.

And my childhood "solution" to immortality was of the same spirit. Incrementing real-life numbers (like number of languages studied: five, for me) doesn't inherently lead to anything. So I think I've unfigured it out, now.

I'm still mulling over Ellen's comment: "...And the truth is, we can't all be famous, but it is in our power to be happy and good."


* The juggling animations on that page were made with some software by Jack, who is in our juggling club at work and one of those superhuman sorts of jugglers I alluded to. I've sorta stopped being surprised by how small the world of software is. Last week I learned that Marius of NetStumbler is a coworker too.