Living at the end of the world

 Short one, but I think one that I'll revisit again and again here.

There is no shortage of suffering in this world. Indeed, unless we're very lucky, almost every one of us will experience extreme suffering and loss through our lives, if only at the end where we lose everything, including our-selves (whatever that may be). Think of the latter as the extreme of personal suffering.

In the other direction, call it collective suffering, we are also on the precipice of, potentially, major global destabilization due to a number of things, not least climate change, which threatens to cause unimaginable suffering on a mass scale. This collective kind of unimaginable suffering is always almost with us, whether it be from war, weather, disease, or ideology, among a host of others.

We tend to fear this kind of collective suffering more than personal suffering, but if you zoom out a little and pay attention, you'll see that the scale of personal suffering is really just a slow moving and mostly invisible, but constant, kind of mass suffering.

Collective suffering itself seems to come in degrees - the collapse of industries that plunge a whole class of workers into poverty, authoritarian regimes, crushing poverty. People suffering, constantly, with no escape. These kinds of suffering, too, are often as invisible to us as the kind of personal suffering you see at the individual or familial level.

So what?

Well, I guess my first point about this stuff is that when we think of the end of the world, we only really consider scenarios of collective suffering. We fear these kinds of things terribly. The end of the world is coming and we're all going to suffer.

I think this is really only so scary for us because we realize that in that scenario there is no escape for us. If everyone suffers the end of the world, then it follows that I am going to suffer too.

The more local kinds of suffering always give us a little distance so we don't feel the full force of it.

I think that it's entirely natural for us to look away from human suffering. And I believe that end-of-the-world scenarios cause us so much grief because of this lack of escape.

But we're always already at the end of the world, aren't we?

 

All these pockets of individual suffering, and local collective suffering. The bodies and the pain and the tears that accompany every moment. Death, death, and death.

My question is something like, is it possible to learn to live authentically at the end of the world that already is?

I don't believe looking away is the answer. Neither can I believe that simply giving up is our only response (nihilism, depression, dejection, loss of hope, all of these are giving-up, in some way, and I believe all of them are natural, but perhaps not inevitable).

So yeah, this is a big question that I'll occasionally write about, because I think about it a lot. No real answers just yet, except that I don't think that looking away is the answer.

Ansible for devops without Vagrant

November 12, 2023, Update to add: One reason to prefer Vagrant over docker is actually because of the mission involved in setting up projects running services. Since containers typically run single processes, systemd isn't necessary to coordinate these processes.

 

 So I'm currently working through Jeff Geerling's great book Ansible for Devops.

However, I wasn't so keen on installing and running vagrant when everything should be doable (I believe) using docker-compose.

At the same time, I'm going through his book so that I can better manage my few Raspberry Pis at home, and I'd like to be able to test my ansible scripts before running them on the live pis.

 

So what I decided to do was kill two birds with one repo and set up a docker-compose based test environment that can run my ansible scripts, but that mirrors my current ripi setup (mostly).

 

Home network

My current homelab is nothing special. Three pis -- coffee, xray, and pizza -- each with a static address on my private network and a dns record pointing to it.

 

So the idea was really simply to set up a docker-compose .yaml file with three services mirroring those, and a primary service I've called "driver" that I can exec into and run ansible from.

 

If you take a look at the "driver" service you'll see I map whatever is in the "ansible" directory to the root's home directory - this should therefore contain your playbooks, inventory, etc. and it'll show up in "driver"'s home.

 

The `ansible/inventory` file simply contains the name of the three services.

 

The Dockerfile

The Dockerfile is pretty simple, but there is some interesting stuff in it.

We install openssh-server and ansible.

In order to make things simple, we generate an ssh-key for root in the container, and then we copy the id_rsa.pub into `authorized_keys` in order to allow any of the containers to ssh into any of the others. Since they share a network, they should just be able to access one another.

Finally, I set an ssh config that disables strict host checking (although it may actually make sense to limit this to xray, pizza, and coffee. I might make this change).

Getting it to work

Once you've cloned the repo, it's as simple as running `docker-compose up` to get the services up and running.

You can then docker-compose exec into "driver" and start running commands.

What is this?

A while back, more than a decade ago (god), I had a friend who recommended blogging as a tool for thinking. Back then I was just getting started with graduate work in cognitive science (something I was new to) and was dealing with insecurity around whether I'd be able to cope etc.

Life has changed, the degree got done in good time, I found I could mostly keep up with everyone around me (although, I also had the good fortune of meeting people who were way, way smarter than me - something everyone should experience as often as possible - more on this later, I'm sure) -- but I dropped the blog when I left my home country (South Africa) for my adopted one (New Zealand).

I more or less got rid of all public channels of communication at that point - all social media, my blog, stopped doing philosophy, and stopped writing fiction.

There were a few reasons for it, but mostly I think I realized that I didn't want to have to deal with the (imagined) pressure of putting myself out in the world publicly.

I've kept to myself these last five or six years. It has been good, in some ways - but in others I feel I've lost something. I used to have greater ambitions. I could articulate them, make plans. These days I find it difficult to even give an outline to something that looks like an ambition.

Maybe that's good. I think ambition for ambition's sake is probably toxic. But I don't think that I'm doing all that I could be doing, and that makes me a little disappointed.

So part of resurrecting this blog (which shares its name with my old blog) is to try and set right some of the issues I'm dealing with -- try actually do something in the real world that has consequence, if only a teensy tiny bit.

What does that look like, exactly?

I'm not sure. But let me make a list of things that I'm kinda interested in, and we can go from there.

• I would like to write and submit a philosophy paper
• I really, really miss doing philosophy, and although I no longer have any ambition of becoming a professional philosopher and academic (something I held as my ultimate goal for a long, long time), I don't see my life as being complete without doing some kind of philosophical thinking and work.
• Write and submit some more fiction.
• I think it's about time for this. I miss writing, despite finding it one of the most challenging things I've ever done.
• Contribute to open source software
• Read important books, report back on them
• Delve deeper into contemplative practices, report back on this
  

 

I suppose that the point is really to record thinking. But why out in public?

I'm not sure. It may be stupid, but what I'm doing right now isn't working. So I'm trying a different approach.

Further, actually having a record of what I've been doing or thinking might be useful, if only for me. 

Blog or it never happened.