Miscellaneous Reflections

on life and the future

I think it’s due time for some semi-sleep deprived rambling on here.

I consider myself to be quite a reflective person - by which I mean I have a tendency to overthink a lot of my life to an extent that’s not necessarily productive. And the interesting thing about reflection is that oftentimes just recognising a problem is not enough to fix it. Even recognising the solution is not enough. You have to actually go out and change things in your life. But habits die hard, and it’s so easy to get drawn back into the old familiar cycles you know are bad for you. So I guess part of the motivation to write this post is that stating things publicly engages the brain in a very different way than cycling through vague patterns of thought. I am writing this in the hope that it will cause my to take these reflections more seriously, by tying it more strongly to my identity, and create changes that persist for longer. I guess I’ll see what happens.

Gap Year

It has recently occurred to me that I’m about halfway through my gap year. This is somewhat terrifying. I had so many hopes for what this year would look like. And don’t get me wrong, this has certainly been a pretty eventful 6 months (wtaf how has 6 months passed!!???), and has been great in many ways. But fundamentally, I think that right now, I am missing a lot of the intensity and directionality I expected of myself at this point. I feel like I’m drifting through my life, with a bunch of things I feel I have to do, but no real coherent vision or long-term plan. Speaking of which,

Planning

I’ve never been good at planning. Well, more precisely, I think I’m pretty good at making plans when I need to, but not really making myself stick to them, and so end up planning very little. I think some part of me finds the notion of planning vaguely authoritarian - like what right does my past self have to tell present-me what to do? Surely present-me has more relevant information to what would be best to do at any given time, and I should just leave it up to him to judge in the moment what to do. And so my present self will quite quickly discard past-me’s judgement whenever he sees something he wants to do more.

Of course, this is a very silly attitude to take. Planning does not have to involve self-coercion, but rather can be built on trust between my different selves over time. It is so easy to get caught up in the minutia of what’s immediately fighting for our attention, and fail to see the big picture of what’s actually worth caring about. And I guess without a concrete plan, I often get overloaded by decision paralysis. With no real way to prioritise between different considerations, it’s a lot harder to be motivated to work on a single problem when there’s always a part of my mind that’s wondering whether I should be doing something else instead. A nice way of thinking about planning is amortising the computational cost of task prioritisation to a fixed window of time instead of continuously prioritising in the background of whatever else I’m doing that day.

I think the bare basics of planning would involve me setting out what I want to get done tomorrow just before I go to bed every day, and roughly what times I will spend working. But I also think it is very important to do weekly + monthly + yearly reviews - a habit that I’ve never quite managed to make stick. If any of you are interested in weekly meetups or calls for some mutual accountability, please do send me a message.

Attention

I don’t do enough hard things anymore - even coding is now mostly shallow works thanks to the agents. I find myself very distractible, and wasting more time than I’d like on social media, reflexively picking up my phone whenever I’m getting bored. This does not seem like a good use of my time. I want to a) embrace boredom / doing hard things a bit more as a means of training my attention span and b) relieve my boredom with something I endorse slightly more.

Education

One of my goals this year was to figure out how to study well, so that when I come back to uni (if I come back to uni), I won’t have forgotten how to do everything I learned, and I am able to handle my course with less time and effort. And if I decide not to go back to uni then I’ll at least have some confidence in my ability to self-study. There are also so many fields I want to learn so much more about, but without any external pressure, I find myself unable to make time for it. I think I need to add some studying regularly into a schedule.

Reading

I would like to read every day. I guess I can do this in the morning.

Doing things

I would like to be more content with scrappy imperfect solutions to things rather than dreaming of sophisticated systems without actually doing anything concrete.

Writing

Ok let’s go back to writing every day. Even if it’s short and scrappy and maybe not on substack. I’ve also realised that writing in the ways I want to involves a continuous effort of notetaking and ideation and developing instead of trying to spontaneously concoct things out of nowhere.

Environment

Kinda obvious but environment matters so much for my productivity. Trying to go to a cafe / co-working space more often, and reaching out to cowork with friends.

Travelling

On one hand, I’d like to do more travelling this year while I have the time/flexibility and changes in environment can often be good for getting into good habits. However, it is also quite destabilising and I feel like I want more stability right now.