A Little Bit Tired of Life - April 2022 Edition

My life feels like it has plateaued. It’s weird. I’m in this weird little spot where I feel like there’s soo much potential but I haven’t yet figured out a way to unlock it.

My solution today: put it on paper. Well technically online. But you get the drift. I’ll write down what I intend to do and why and document the actual doing on social media. Instagram, Twitter, TikTok.

For a while I struggled with where to put this information. Information about me struggling to figure out my career. On my professional blog it felt too unprofessional and here it felt too career-ish. But today I realized, this is my space. I can do whatever I want with it. And in the last 7 days only 6 people have actually visited the site. So its practically just me here.

Fine. With that out of the way… let’s get into my present situation, then the way forward.

I have a few things going on right now. I have an internship I started January 3rd 2022. Its 6 months long so its scheduled to end July 3rd. I have my Undergraduate degree. I have a writing fellowship run by the company I am interning for. I haven’t really participated in this and I feel super behind on it all. Actually, for everything except my Undergraduate, I feel super behind on.

I live in a bedsitter (studio appartment). I currently pay for all my living expenses. My parents pay for my Undergraduate. I use my internship stipend to finance my living expenses.

I am currently not in a romantic relationship.

I have a few good friends. Like if I didn’t have money for dinner I know I wouldn’t go hungry.

The primary thing for me right now feels like it should be my career. I feel like I can’t sustain a romatic relationship. In the sense that I haven’t mastered the use of my time so it always feels like a romatic partner is fighting for my time with me. So I think I kinda need to learn how to use my time before graduating to sharing it with a significant other.

Okay so in terms of my career. I feel like after loosing my first job, I stagnated. The pandemic happened then I started my undergraduate. Then I purposed to learn how to do front end web development. I started then struggled to stay consistent and also struggled to find learning resources that resonated with me and kept me on that learning journey. I think I kinda have at the moment. But I got distracted trying to land a job.

Lol, I just wrote that and realized that trying to get this job has totally derailed me. Given that I had to learn and entirely new stack and one that doesn’t necessarily align with where I want to take this whole software development thing. Hmmmm… that was an interesting realization moment. I guess I need to recenter and focus on what I want. Which is the frontend development skill as opposed to chasing what I think will get me paid immediately.

I kinda need to figure out what’s important to me. To do this, I’ll tap into Julian Shapiro’s article : “How to figure out what to do with your life”.

He brings up two things that I find super important:

  1. The Regret minimization framework.
  2. Optimizing your work for what you value.

Regret minimization

The general idea here is:

What choices can you make today that minimize the regret you’ll feel as an 80-year-old looking back on your life? When you minimize future regret, you sleep well knowing you’re maximizing fulfillment.

So for me, in regards to my career, I would really regret not giving my go at becoming a software engineer a genuine and consistent effort. And in that effort doing the uncomfortable thing of learning in public to give myself the best odds.