I’m really disheartened today. Lately I’ve had this growing sense of feeling that I’m getting dumber and dumber each day; and I fail to understand the why or what I can even do about it. I wouldn’t say I was some genius even back then, but abstract reasoning was still something I could do to some level. In my lofty imaginations, I’d often considered being able to reason and dream as a defining characteristic of a human; by that same logic, I did feel contempt towards most people, all in my own delusions of grandeur and narcissism.
But now I fear the day when I’m reduced to some animal, not many would be able to tell the difference, no one perhaps, for it is the “normal” for them. But I would know ( it dreads me to imagine a fall so deep to not even be aware, so I would avoid imagining a scenario where I’m that lost ) and the pressing problem today is what can I do about it, as day by day I visibly notice myself not being able to function like I used to.
Let me just lay out what happened today, for my future self.
The problem that I was trying to solve today was by all means really simple, not really I guess but still something that I should’ve been able to work with.
Problem There’s a candy and a ( possible ) token in n sequential bags. Say you have opened the first i bags, now you can pay 1 token to open the next bag, how many total candies can you get. Find this for each i.
Throughout my attempts at solving this, I always felt so close yet so far. There was even a desperate phase of guessing post which I fell back to rigorously defining eveything in math and after several attempts at that ( where I made different carelesss mistakes at different steps ), I did get to a solution as follows
for i ( 1 based index ), you can eat till first j ( > i) such that cost(j) = i cost defined as sum over prefix j bags cost is 1 if there’s no token and 0 otherwise.
But this is wrong too for this j is >=i, which I missed and by the time I got to this above, I was so disappointed with myself that I’d just given up and knowing that it must be some minute change ( as in code, but not logically since it’s wrong, there’s no such thing as a small error, it’s an error and a wrong solution by all means ), I just asked the clanker to fix it and it moved a line bottom to up; I must not make the mistake of believing that I “almost” got it, as tempting as it is as a cope.
I was not like this, I should’ve been able to do this, much faster as well. Not just reasoning, but my memory is suffering too. I remember that I was able to recall so so much from memory when I was younger; exact passages from books, pages of it, events of the week in order, and I was really proud of it all. My reasoning, well that was always lacking, but never my memory, and I’m losing that as well now, I barely recall yesterday or the day before in as vivid detail as I used to remember weeks. I’m afraid that I might be misremembering my past as well, maybe it was always like this, but I would like to believe not, for even though I may not be able to quanitfy the degradation correctly but I that some damage has been done is indisputable. These are the things I used to be proud of about myself, for I had nothing else to be, and now I’ve lost those as well.
What would I have left if I lose it all? I always had an intense hatred for median, “rather on the worse end than the middle” is what I used to believe. I’ll lose my sanity first if it continues as is, and I have some deperate ideas but I’m not sure how much each will help, nevertheless, doing nothing is out of question.
It’s looking bleak and hopeless, that’s the most probable outcome here, my only little respite is this note where I can alteast write, for no one. This is perhaps what Charlie felt ( I understand I’m nowhere close, but it is as significant for me as it might’ve been for him ), but there won’t be any flowers for me.