...or probably more like dealing with ineptitude.

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As life goes by and I get older, I start to get all nostalgic about 25-year-old me,

the age when I could soak up information and had so much brain power but nowhere to direct it except survival.

When I was 25 years old, I reminisced about 20-year-old me, before the concussion and how it silently changed the way I memorized things.

How I had to deal with asthma and shortness of breath,

and how I have to keep on this visceral fat that will protect me from a certain kind of pain,

but which will form a feedback loop with cortisol and keep me at a level of stress.

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Recent exercise has allowed me to burn off the stress and sharpen my mind,

which I can gauge by seeing my ranking in chess as well as how much I don't need to think to arrive at conclusions.

I also can think about the worries of Taiwan, of the people suffering in this world, without too much depression or weight upon my mind.

But the positives aren't so much an "advantage" as the lack of a disadvantage:

Exercise is just a preventive measure that points out even more saliently the woes of aging.

I see older folks, and know that I can run laps around them in brainpower that it's obscene and absurd,

but also realize that my friends in their prime age of 25 can do the same to me.

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I feel it all too painfully true that I am a process in history, and it is my lot to be in this history and have all my freedom-allowed actions be weighed against it.

And so I find myself reflecting on each chapter of my life. Have I been rich towards God in my late 20s?

What should I have known then that I could have known then and that I do know now?

What limitations have I complacently allowed myself to rest in?

I judged 20s-me: how incredibly myopic were those articles I wrote then.

If only I had been smarter and thought more, I could have gotten to this bird's eye-view I reached at the middle and the end of my seminary studies.

What did I gain in place of that, and was it worth it?

Maybe a penetrating introspection that allows me to talk to the very being of someone who is about to die?

The right words that lead him through his phenomenological near-death world to the only ray of hope?

An all-accepting personality that is willing even to make friends with psychopaths (provided that I can stay reasonably safe)?

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And why do I need to judge myself? Will it change the way I live my life in the future?

Sometimes I even feel myself judged by my past self--there are incredible traits in the past me that are more noble than the present me,

and I have much to repent for in the present. I am stuck in a rolling, dialectical process with myself.

I no longer have the patience to incisively write out all the matrices and logical elements of thoughts,

but am willing to trip over many hurdles and create heuristics in my head that allow me to use the intuitive "system one" to do the work of the logical "system two."

Should I be rushing like this? Am I mistaken in using these "meta-" level concerns to direct me?

Is joy an accurate guide?

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I will admit that my personality has been greatly influenced by some of the stuff I've been reading:

Sci-fi books that say that we would be more efficient if we didn't let consciousness bog us down with meaningless questions, but just "do."

And so I "did" philosophical inquiries, turning it into a process that just keeps churning on default and can't shut down at night unless I drown it out with pink/brown noise and get myself tired enough.

Adding Feynman's path integrals (although not just inspired by that), and I thought that I could suspend all these questions in my brain and eventually I would arrive at the right question and answer set

by some neurological summation of all the paths, and derive some principle of stationary action for any philosophical inquiry.

I can say without a shred of ego that I think it does work, but is it worth the price? 

Should I try some other method that "works"?

This is one major area in which I need faith and reliance, that this is the state that I have arrived at, and I should continue in good conscience to do this unreservedly according to my present understanding,

until someone else can convince me otherwise.