Journey Thoughts

So, I still exist...

Hewwo world!

It's your "quirky" underground writer here.

I know I've had the posting consistency of a literal potato, but we move. Quality over quantity is the mantra. I also don't need to publish everything. I  don't know y'all like that :) But if you happen to be in my bestie circle you're always in line to some of my more personal thoughts. But I guess I'll open up. I think this is just like any relationship - and relationships take time. So we'll get there. 

So a lot has happened since my last post: finished undergrad (tentatively, let's not jinx it (: ), presented a project that was about as well put together as a house of cards, David Dobrik finally returned to YouTube after a Covid-induced hiatus and got to the brink of being cancelled, but I won't dwell on that. Elon Musk became the richest man alive much to the delight of tech enthusiasts and meme connoisseurs alike but at the time of writing this he's fallen to third after an appalling couple of weeks. Lost about $6.5 Billion just yesterday. Crazy to think, that alone is about the annual budget of a third world country. Anyway, the marketplace is a wild place and in future bitcoin and other crypto could be more  mainstream than fiat currency. Our Martian meme lord fights to live another day.

Speaking of bitcoin, it's still shooting to the stratosphere and the savvy investors who bought the after dip last March are probably still crying tears of joy. Multiplied ten-fold ($5K to $50K) in a year which is INSANE. I was thinking of getting some DOGE coin, just for the meme. Hopefully it will be worth a couple hundred dollars in the next half decade or so (Manifesting✨✨).  

So yeah, a lot has happened, and I think most significantly, we're not in the hellish experience that was two-thousand and twenty. Truly an infernal 52 weeks. It had it's upsides - even if you're not Jeff Bezos, or Zoom, or a degenerate who YOLOed their life's savings on Bitcoin. If hell is anything like 2020 I can't imagine living through that till the end of time.  2020 was truly an infernal matrimony. 

So, I'm a heavy consumer of YouTube. So much that I'm actively tracking my hours now but I realized how much you can actually gain - and not just from tutorials or DIYs. I've stumbled across a lot of great video essay channels and given I haven't picked up a new book since the tail end of last year, I think it's filled that gap. One of my current favourites is Psych IRL which is written and narrated by an actual psychology major. I always find it interesting learning about what drives behaviours, especially in a broad social context - celebrities, trends and the likes. I find that it gives a better understanding of societal norms as well as ourselves which yields a bit more self-mastery and empathy. So be sure to check it out if you're into that kind of thing.

Anyway, after school, as is the case with any ending, you're at a crossroads - a new checkpoint for a potentially defining moment in your life and for me it was of course, getting a job. Looking through the listings I remembered how excruciating the recruitment process felt because at times it feels like I'm hyping myself up while in the full knowledge that I'm very much a work in progress in my professional career. Heck, I can't even reverse a linked list * sad recruiter noises* . It presents an identity paradox because on one hand I'm expected to "let my uniqueness and personality shine through" while still conforming to a set structure for the "perfect resume and cover letter".  I suppose I take issue with this because of my relationship with my writing. Anything I write is my baby and I want my baby to be authentic, unadulterated, unfiltered. 

However, that is secondary. I guess, I'm what throws me off the most is the gap - or the perceived gap - between my expectations of myself and my abilities and the reality. It goes without saying that competence is a highly valued trait - we seek it in our leaders, our colleagues and most of all from ourselves. It's actually staggering the lengths we got to protect our image of our abilities. Studies show that low self-efficacy is one of the root causes of procrastination. If you doubt your ability to do something  you're more likely to put it off to the last minute - leaving you little time to do it as well as you could have. Giving yourself inadequate time can then be latched on in one of two ways: if you don't do great,  you rationalize that since you didn't have enough time that was why, but if you manage to still pull of satisfactory results, which is rarely the case, then boom, you're awesome. So by creating an artificial handicap, you quite sneakily but effectively protect yourself, or more specifically your ego from taking a hit no matter the outcome of your endeavour. Such are the lengths we go to consciously or subconsciously to protect our self-image.

But at what cost? Usually, we short-change ourselves or sacrifice our well-being by keeping up this trend. Which is why we ought to be more mindful of this.

To be clear, wanting to be appreciated as competent or held in high esteem itself is not the problem. Rather it is a broken simplistic equation performance = ability = self-worth. Therefore the key is to hack this pattern by building a new framework, best explained by Nick Voge of senior associate director of Princeton University's McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning in New Jersey.   

So if competence is a core part of the problem, then I think it makes sense to re-examine how we learn. Which I think is the next frontier for me to explore.   

It's been fun catching up. 

Catch you in the next one (probably). 

Peace, and awesome week ahead.✌