{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

I think I can understand what you are working on-both mathematical and coding/programming projects.

Only at the moment I am trying to build very,very strong foundations-which I could not do due to  back luck when I was younger.

I understand why you wish to proceed in as intellectually honest a manner as possible, for your own peace of mind.

The masses may be distracted by the circus of political elections and Kafkaesque Nightmare Castles, but, for me, it takes hard core, no nonsense, to the roots, trudging through mathematics curriculums creating or enhancing solutions to the exercises, always thrilled to stumble upon something NOVEL during this seemingly endless traversal.   It is like a Sisyphian Boulder I roll up the hill each day, trudging along ... pointless existence of turtle mesmerized by abstact symbols.

I admit with the utmost intellectual honesty that the mathematics is pure distraction from meditating too long upon what the point might be of breathing and satisfying needs, wants ... These "projects" I engage in, my message in a bottle to an imaginary future, it is all a fiction used by my nervous system to entice the Beast to trudge along, to humbly and dilegently peck away.

I admit to not fully appreciating the severity of my "chains" (to existence, that is).  I have only been close to death a few times, but every time I nearly choke on my food, I instantaneously experience the Will to Live in my own Animal Body.

Still, Holden is on point in suggesting spending a good portion of our mental energies meditating on death, for it reveals a very mysterious element about the nature of our biological existence.   Death and biology are related intimately.  Our awareness of death may be our species' universal curse, but I can't imagine that any of the "higher" animals are not aware of death.  They see it every day.

Yes, perhaps cockroaches are also aware of death.

But, plants, vegetation, no - I do not think they know this thing "death."

Death is in time and space.  And yet I am of bones and veins, blood and guts and excrement.

So many lies we must keep puffed up as a false reality so that we do not reflect too long on our true natures, the one that has to urinate and deficate, the one that gets tired, exhausted, overwhelmed - the animal creature Thing.  As I said before, I distract myself from these brute facts by trying to focus on getting through the last of a series of texts I've been working through.  It is my own little world, like the shell of a turtle. 

The entire project has taken on a significance like one might find in a story by Poe or Ligotti or even Lovecraft, where I, the protagonist, have ventured so deeply into the roots and structure of pure mathematics, discovering a secret delight in going over ever-so-meticulously those texts from high school that I had once blamed for my nervous breakdown, that I have been able to cement a kind of parallel-universe reality, where I am able to take certain ideas seriously which most people I come in contact with find useless if not annoying and boring - this is the hum-drum thread holding my entire life together.  I even leave little comments that certain exercises are "mechanical" or "dull" or "boring," noting specifically where Schopenhauer might use the term "drudgery," where he suggests, in the 1800's, creating a machine to perform the task as it is pure tedium for the sentient human consciousness.  I suppose some of his contemporaries were tinkering with such machinery, as the ancients have been doing for eons I imagine.

I understand that the first set of exercises in each section may be meant to give the student some confidence in basic structure as it relates to methods.  I am a patient man who must be bonkers for "sticking to his plan" even as it has proven to be some kind of lifelong task preventing me from "venturing into the workaday world."  It would be evidence of some kind of obsession.  Obsessive and compulsive serving of my Muse, toiling where She commands.