Well yeah, tough luck.

Now I don’t want to self diagnose myself as ADHD, even though a lot of people have commented me to be so, but we don’t really do diagnosis in India (cause well, mental health is a myth, and waking up early is the only thing you need to solve all your problems, guess what I already wake up at 5 fucking AM, and I still have issues, so fuck that theory at the very least.)

Anyway, as you can see from my other posts and also this post as well, I find it super hard to focus my attention on anything for a long time, a long time here just means 2 mins, which is super weird, because while I have the attention span of a goldfish, I also like to read books a lot, and not tiny, smutty YA romance (even though that is my favorite ) but also dense fiction or hard core sci-fi ( Asimov’s Foundation trilogy has become a recent obsession, only to be devoured in its entirety in a few days, with nothing left to fill the void ). And reading books like this needs attention, a LOT of attention, and somehow I am able to spend an entire day reading books, but not able to spend like 10 mins alone with myself, in a fucking train ride to home.

In the last 40 mins of sitting in this train, I have, read parts of a book from my kindle, did some work from office ( on my leave day, by myself, cause well ), and then due to the slow internet speed retired myself to pouring my thoughts on this website, to fucking calm myself down a bit. All the while also twirling around with my phone and changing songs like every 2 mins.

Yeah, ADHD much

It kinda makes it hard to be around other people, when you just can’t sit by and just exist. I am pretty sure I am coming off as a bit of crackpot to the people around me, but oh well, hello strangers, I’ll never meet again.

I sometimes feel I should get this diagnosed, it doesn't feel normal, and idk how much it affects my normal life, my mental peace, my personal and professional life and well everything else. It might be why I have found it terribly hard to focus inside any classroom, why I can’t learn from any live teacher, and why I have a tendency of becoming addicted to my mobile phone if I start using it for longer ( I actively supress it a lot ) .

It feels a bit hard to deal with this, while also managing a lot of things in your life, but also sometimes it helps, because it develops the ability to multi-task a lot more than the average Joe, but then there is the whole debate about deep work and multi-tasking, so not really sure what the tradeoff is there as well.

Well anyway, enough ranting in a train, should go back to civilization.

Until the next one !

I am currently 24 years old, with a professional lifespan of ~2.5–3 years , so talking about something spanning 40 years of my life, while I haven’t even lived 25 of my own in the first place, feels a little weird, but what else do you do on a nice lazy Sunday morning? Also out of the 24 years lived, I just remember the ones from around the 16th year, and so I really feel more like 8 year old¹, the first 16 years all seem coalesced into this one giant panorama of blurry snapshots of past memories².

While no one can predict how long a career would last, owing to the unpredictability of both death, and health³ , if all goes well, it would at least be for 40 odd years, if not more, owing to the improvements in healthcare, given that society sets an average retirement age of 60ish?

Even though I can’t really imagine sitting on a beach⁴ somewhere, enjoying my retirement reading books for the rest of my life after that, there would be some element of work, in some form. Given the fact that my ability to create impact would probably be the maximum at that age, given the connections I have hopefully developed by that time⁵, and the free time that old age would provide, should more or less offset the depreciation in productivity that a declining health will lead to.

Thinking about this long journey ahead, actually feels quite relaxing, it takes the pressure off my shoulders to reach certain “milestones” earlier in life, since there is quite a bit of time to do whatever I want to do. It makes it okay to spend a few more months in the city you have come to love⁶, in a job that you don’t love anymore, or spend a bit more time with the people you have come to think of as family, before leaving your nest once again. It makes it okay to take that job that excites you, but doesn’t pay that well. It makes it okay to stay with your family for a bit longer, and put aside the plans for exploring the countries you want to explore for sometime. It makes it okay to spend some more time learning the ropes of your field, to become a student again and pursue your intellectual curiosities a bit more.

Taking this long view, also makes me appreciate the value of the people around me quite a bit. It only makes sense, that other people will have their own 40 year career around me, and will achieve things which are incredibly hard to predict right now. You never know who will become what, or who you’ll get close to, and it just makes it super important to treat everyone well, and also looking back at the brief career I already have had, it was the people who defined the life I was having⁷.

Another important thing to take care of is quite obviously my health. I am already kind of a fitness enthusiast of sorts⁸, but there is a lot in the mental space that needs to be worked upon. It becomes evident on the days when I am sick, or even slightly under the weather, how futile everything else suddenly seems, and all things come to halt, until my body is back to normal, so if this machine needs to be working for 40 more years, it will only do so under proper maintenance and under acceptable workloads, its possible to overclock it a bit at times, but not always⁹.

Also, the work I do will definitely change over time, I will probably not be an IC for 40 years, and my work will not be defined by what I do, but what I enable other people to do¹⁰, and thus its increasingly more important to get better at people skills, not just my technical skills. Also, the field which I work in, which is currently AI, might change, and I might find an alternative career more fulfilling, or just be forced into it due to any number of reasons¹¹, this puts things in perspective, when it sometimes feel like the work I am doing right now, is the only sort of work I’ll be doing forever.

So much for a 40+ year long career, so many things to explore, people to meet, places to be and…

Work to be done.

Tangents

1. My emotional age, might actually be somewhere around that lol
2. This reminds me of the ending of the Death’s end, when SPOILER ALERT, the entirety of humanity is converted from a 3D world, to a 2D image of sorts, only in my case, its like time is flattened into one place for the first score of my life, so it would be more like a 3D cube.
3. Increasingly started to think about health-span, instead of just lifespan after reading David Sinclair’s book Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don’t Have To
4. Actually, make that a library, my old bod might need the beach sun, but the brain would crave library, OR actually, I’ll take my Kindle equivalent to the beach lol
5. I currently suck at making professional ( or even for that matter personal ) connections, but that will hopefully improve over time, or I’ll shamelessly latch on the connections of the few people I know, similar to how my strategy for making friends as a kind of introvert is to just befriend one very extroverted person lol ( cue to my super extrovert pseudo-sister here )
6. Hyderabad — home, hardest city to leave.
7. There is this view of not making friends at work, I disagree with it, maybe its just yet to be broken naivety, but its impossible for me to not connect with the people I work on a more personal level, when I spend almost the entirety of 5/7 of my days with them
8. Someone recently pointed out, that this is in fact not the case, I am just good at controlling my impulses for junk food and I just like to work out lol
9. Which is a bit hard while working in a rapidly growing startup
10. While I’ll always want to be an IC in some capacity, I do understand that I am not super talented enough to keep growing in that role, and will have to leverage other people’s talents to make up for my own
11. Plain old market forces, or a war, AI automation, hostile AGI takeover, something like the cultural revolution in China, climate change, health, family commitments, aliens, super-intelligent animal takeover, or <INSERT FAVORITE POST APOCYLPITIC TROPE>

Talks about the lack of or the slow decline of play children have in their childhood and how play Becoming more used to just sitting on the computer and this is so much true for me myself

Another point is made on the lack of commitment required in virtual worlds. You physically talk to someone and there was a high bar for entry and exit and that made you more amiable and like you develop better relationship skills. Whereas in the virtual world, you don’t even need to use your own name and you can easily block someone and like living in such a world where you can easily cut off connections It’s very different from how the real world is.

If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren’t you ashamed that you have made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you so that it automatically becomes confused and upset.

Epictetus

Most parents don’t want their children to have a phone-based childhood, but somehow the world has reconfigured itself so that any parent who resists is condemning their child to social isolation.

Makes a counterpoint to the argument that isn’t Gen Z right to be anxious and depressed because 21st century is Having so many disasters, financial crisis, 9–11, covid and whatnot. But it said that if you actually map the data of those events to the increase in Depression rates, there is not a strong correlation

Also the gender bias that it affected teenage girls more than teenage boys is not explainable by economic events.

Also they say the generation which grows up under a stronger political cause like a war, actually shows higher degrees of cooperation and trust

Forever elsewhere

Children’s brains grow to 90% of full size by age 5 but then take a long time to configure themselves, this is slow-growth for cultural learning

Animals are either designed to be in defend mode or discover mode, based on where they are in the food chain. Those in the discover mode are happier

Online world is much more dangerous, because small mistakes can bring enormous costs, like vitality, large scale public humiliation

The cost of a thing is the amount of life required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Kurt Voneger book mentioned Harrison Bergeron, is set in a modern America, where by constitutional amendment, nobody is allowed to be smarter, better looking or physically more capable then anyone else, so if someone has a higher IQ, they have an earpiece, just interrupting them every 20 secs to drop their IQ lol

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words, Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski

As jobs involve lesser physical skill and more people skill, boys are being left behind?

Thoda went red pill lol

Also says that boys used to learn a lot from risky behaviours, which are being reduced?

Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get. The measure you give will be the measure you get.

• Another of the cult sci-fi books by Asimov

The premise of the stories is that in the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, the mathematician Hari Seldon devises the theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematics of sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a dark age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Although the momentum of the Empire’s fall is too great to stop, Seldon devises a plan by which “the onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little” to eventually limit this interregnum to just one thousand years. The books describe some of the dramatic events of those years as they are shaped by the underlying political and social mechanics of Seldon’s Plan

• Starts with Gaal Dornick, the biographer of Hari Seldon
• Talks about imperial coronation, so probably a monarchy?
• The Jumps → Wormholes, for instant travel

Childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child

Well, talk about relatable 😛

They seem to have flying cars, for one, and also tunnels. So I think the car moves through tunnels, like walls which have holes in them and each hole is a tunnel.

It seems a bit post-apocalyptic. Actually, it is. It is not post-apocalyptic, it is pre-apocalyptic. Because it predicts a crumble in the future. But yeah, it seems like hyper-loop’s inspiration.

The story is based in Trantor, which is the capital of the imperial government, which is like an intergalactic, multi-planetary, galactic empire. It has a population of 40 billion which is a lot, but all of these people work in administration because I think it’s a play on how mundane bureaucracy can get so that 40 billion people are in it just for the bureaucracy and all of them are dependent on other colonies of sorts for their daily needs agricultural things and stuff so they say that this makes it very vulnerable to I’ll show some forwarding to the fact that this actually happened and they were rewarded and stuff. And I think this is a play on… Maybe England and its colonies and how it fall later how it fell later or maybe even uh u.s who knows

There is no greenery, no soil, no life other than man, apart from the imperial palace which is in 100 square miles of natural soil and has greenery. So yeah, definitely apocalyptic. Or maybe not.

Actually, now that I think of it, the imperial nature might be for China because of the play on population and the economical destruction. I think since it is written from an American perspective, this might be referring to China. Because why would they be dissing on their own country after all? Or maybe they would be. I don’t know. I need to look this up.

They use tunnels, actually not tunnels, they have tunneled the ground so that they’re almost a mile below the ground level and they use the temperature difference, I think the geothermal energy for all the power needs and they just say they used to use atomic energy but now they just use this.

Seldon’s a chad

So they are trying to build a very giant encyclopaedia which captures all the information possible so that when the eventual fall of civilisation occurs humanity has access to all the knowledge it had in the past so that it can bootstrap it faster and the amount of suffering is greatly reduced probably like a thousand years instead of 30,000 years of suffering so that is what its plan and the rest of the book is how they go about doing that i think so now in the next chapter they are preparing to build that giant encyclopaedia on a planet called Terminus but there’s this one guy, I think some general or something or some king who wants to occupy Terminus because it has strategical importance and there’s some back and forth

I can just feel the generic distaste for anything other than science in the author’s writing. He’s like, science is the biggest thing and rest all these… Be it beuaracracy, civil force, military force, it doesn’t understand anything. It is, I can see why this inspired the hacker’s culture.

I think this new society which is called Foundation is having an internal revolt of sorts because initially it was just… And they want to create a normal society there. The scientists are against it. And there’s also the matter of protecting the foundation from outside attackers.

And I think Sheldon has already overlooked or predicted… .

Well, turns out the encyclopedia thing was a scam. And now they are just trying to fend off… Having a standoff based on that and later they established like a diplomatic solution in which they give their technical expertise to the kingdoms around and are able to survive for now.

Violence is the last refuge for the incompetent

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtelty

One overarching theme in this book is that of, I think, statistical predictions. Anyway, so what they’re proposing is that it is possible to predict the future based on a theory of mass behaviour, how masses act, but only if the masses are not aware that they are being observed.

So there’s this one guy in this who is sort of trained in psychology, he sometimes tries to analyze things. Things which are going on and other than that also, he said that in the moment of crisis There would be only one possible solution And one obvious way to go, which is a way to reduce any deviation from the predicted path.

So, he keeps on letting things go by until there is exactly one possible… solution or one possible plan of action in the face of crisis. Pretty cool.

This book reminds me so much of the three body problem because it has these awesome moments where shit just changes in like a page. And I mean in this section the guy Haradin was he’s also almost chad like Seldon. I don’t know if seldon is the inspiration for Sheldon. Sheldon and Sheldon sound very similar. But anyway, he did an UNO reverse on the guys who were invading their planets. Basically, he gave them his technology, but he gave them under the guise of a religion. He created a religion from the technology.

and like he indoctrinated and created a dogmatic religion around it and once he had that cult following he just It was like a soft takeover where he overtook the military by through And it is interesting to note how much that is related to Christianity.

They say because Seldon did not know the individual heroic actions that anyone would do. He betted on more macroeconomic factors, so he betted on the macroeconomic forces that will emerge and solve the crises. In the first case, it was some sort of technological advantage.

In the second case, it was religion. They converted the other, the enemy, to the missionary approach and the third, I think it is trade. They will… Survive by offering trade to the partners. So yeah, it’s pretty cool. So the Person who planned this all planned not on the individual heroics of people but on Statistically predictable economical forces.

Pretty cool.

So yeah, the book ended with the third crisis, which was to be solved using trade. Their daily technology like the ovens and stuff would fail and they wouldn’t want to do that and it turned out to be true It is actually A bit similar to the first one, the first one was also technology related and I think the last one was also technology related.

They just wrapped it more in the sense of trade instead of technology. The first one was purely technology based. There was no trade there. The second one was religion-based. The third one is trade-based, but that trade is only enabled due to the technology they have.

Writing this just after trying to smudge my glasses clear, it’s safe to say I can really use some clarity in my life at the moment.

While I don’t like normalising disorders, by claiming to have them, since I am not diagnosed with any of them, yet. I still feel I might be borderline ADD, since I can’t seem to focus on anything, and my mental clarity is pretty much worse than my visual clarity, and they don’t even make glasses for that, do they?

If there is one type of people, I envy the most, it’s the fucking specialists. The ones who seem to be born with a purpose in mind, who have absolute clarity in their thoughts, and are perfectly fine in executing that with almost psychopathic single-mindedness.

In a world with so many choices, how do people get this zen like clarity about what they want in their life, and how do they commit to something, without being worried about the opportunity costs it has, and all the other shiny things they can be chasing, instead of doubling down on one single thing?

I find it extremely hard to commit to any single thing, hell, with the year starting, I ended up opening almost 10 books in parallel, not being able to decide which one to read, and ended up reading all of them a bit by bit ( although eventually settling to finish a few of them, but still wasting a lot of time in the exploration).

The same goes for my professional life, when I was still an undergrad, I used to spend my time chasing every new field I could find, and trying to learn the basics of it, but which lead to a very superficial understanding of things, and always made me look with awe at people, who dedicated their effort in a single field, and became fucking good at it.

I feel the world is designed to reward people who show clarity of thought, I think it is because it is hard to achieve that. Because it is hard to have the conviction and the confidence to believe that what you have chosen is the right thing, and the universe rewards you for that conviction.

One problem for this lack of clarity is the seeming impossibility of predicting anything in an adult life. Most of the impactful events of the past have been unplanned, and life just happened to smack me in my face, one sudden day, when it chose so, how are you supposed to have any clarity in things while living in such an uncertain world?

It is also however true, that the moments when I have felt at peace with myself, and had absolute clarity of thoughts, are clearly somehow superior to the usual brain fog that inhabits my brain. I want to maximise moments such as those, but they are few to find and small to last, and disappear into thin air, like fog on glass.

Given the (debatable) fact that we come into this earth tabula rasa, or as a clean slate, its is very interesting to observe it being slowly written on, and erased, time and time again, becoming more of a used slate, with dust traces from the past settling as biases withhold (there is a word for exactly this, which my dumb self will later use google to figure out — EDIT — Palimpsest), and new spaces made for me to be sensitive about issues which I was till now unaware, or simply ignorant of.

Yours truly, has never been much of a politically inclined person, social issues were never a concern for an upbringing, which was middle class enough to allow glimpses into the fact that something was potentially wrong with the world around, but also privileged enough to allow the bliss that is ignorance.

Well, shit changes…..sometimes, when you least expect it.

While reading books is usually seen has a harmless hobby, a mere pastime of the intelligentsia, a thing people do on lazy Sundays, with a well brewed cup of coffee in hand and the sun shining through the window, (totally not describing my own Sundays.. ahem) sometimes, they are not so harmless, and might change the entirety of your being, in just a few pages. Afterall, most of society, is driven by a few religious books, and most political philosphies, were first written as a book or a manifesto or a treatise.

While I started my reading journey, with typical young adult, coming of age books ( the harry potters, Percy Jackson, Colleen Hoover? ) , over the last 1 year or so, there is a whole new genere which is starting to attract me. And with it, came a whole new phase of discovering a new sensitivity to the society around, which I inhabit.

This is not a political piece however, I still don’t have a political philosphy of my own, and as someone who hasn’t even voted yet, ever, I am the last person to say anything about any social issue, but I will do so anyway, cause…it’s my blog lol

When talking about social issues, does it make sense to only talk about the country you live in? or are you supposed to talk about the issues which are faced in the world in general. Should I talk about racism in the US, or castesim in India? Is a global problem like climate change one that demands attention, or the threats to democracy in the world’s most populous country the issue? With so many things wrong in a world, which pretends to be working absolutely fine like clockwork, what problems do you claim as your own, what problems you chose to ignore as somehow less worthy of care, how do people develop their own socio-political agenda? I have no clue.

Are you supposed to follow a bottom-up approach, trying to make small improvements in the world immediately around you, or do you take a top-down approach, and campaign the fix the largest problems we face as a society. I personally feel more attracted towards the top-down approach, since I feel powerless against the tyranny of the masses, and the pestilence like nature of the inertia to change, renders a bottom up approach inefficient and a Sisyphean attempt at best.

I have never felt much attached to the nation I was born in, I didn’t chose to be born in this weird as hell world, with more problems than solutions, I didn’t chose the religion my family adopts, nor the cultural surroundings which have tainted my view of the world, in their view. I believe that the first 22 years of my life, were a blip, with barely any identity being formed, or maybe I have just dissolved whatever identity I had created in the past.

For the future, I hope I find issues that I think are worth solving, people I want to support, movements which feel like my own, identities I adopt, and maybe again discard as the time goes by.

Whatever the case be, its finally time for me, to wake up to reality —

Andrej Karpathy, famously spent a lot of time manually labelling the Imagenet dataset, looking a just a shit ton of images, and trying to figure out what they represent, and that effort led to the recent AI boom almost as much as anything else. But, how did it feel for him, and other researchers at Stanford, and at other academic labs, to be the ones putting in the manual grind to painfully, and slowly label these datasets, and get these models to work, when they, just fucking wont. Probably fun, mostly.

I am in no way even remotely close to the level of work done my these now almost mythical forefathers of our fields, but, hell, I have spent a LOT of time manually labelling datasets, looking at way too many images of travel destinations I had no hope of actually travelling during my stint in the travel team at MSFT, and an inhuman amount of time listening to different pronunciations of names and different tonalities and accents of humans in my current job. And I think I have become a lot more sensitive to human voices and sounds due to it, mostly.

A few of my colleagues work in lip-sync, where you have to create accurate AI generated lip-motions for an accompanying AI generated audio for a human speaker, and I can safely say that I suck at identifying what makes a good lip-sync. My teammates attribute this to my habit of consuming a plethora of anime, that too in sub, so I am more used to looking down at the subtitles than at the face of the characters to the point where I didn’t even realise that most animes have minimal lip-motion and at one point I almost sweared to someone that animes have diverse lip movements only to be shown multiple videos characters having just simple vertical or horizontal movements lol. My teammates working on lip-sync are however a different case, and have almost a superhuman ability to detect even a minor offset between lip movements and audios, while I am just sitting there finding no difference at all, mostly.

I wrote about occupational hazards in a previous post, which was mostly a negative take on how the tech industry is affecting my personality, but there is also something really transforming about being the human behind an AI. It has really made me more sensitive to things which we often take for granted as humans, and has probably changed me fundamentally in how I reason about things. A simple example of this is, text to speech, after working on it for 8 months now, I mentally play out any text I see or any name I see and think about how easy or hard would it be for an AI to read it out, and what mistakes it might make. Also since I have seen how hard it is for an AI to speak properly, even when trained on hundreds of thousands of hours, it is hard not to appreciate the easy at which we are able to just speak, and communicate with each other so well, mostly.

Another interesting effect of becoming more cognisant of this effect is the important of choosing important problems to work on, which I am actually interested in ( and quite frankly, I wasn’t interested in text-to-speech at all previously, now I do find it quite interesting ), since those are the areas of the human experience I will become more knowledgeable about and probably develop and unfair advantage in, well…. mostly :P

What stroke my fancy in one of my ever present parallel thought plane of mental existence, was the “personality” hazards which your career might expose you to.

I have been working in the tech industry for a little over 2 years now, and a little introspection makes it clear that my personality has been affected by my choice of occupation, if its been a hazard or not in this regard, is upto anyone’s guess.

I think my current mental utility function, the force that drives me, assuming I am a rational agent (which I certainly am not), is heavily conditionally dependent on my occupation. A lot of things which are important to me as a person, might not have hold any value for me if I was in a different career.

I am a deeply individualistic person (having already use the phrase “I” 9 times since beginning this article), and I don’t really care about anyone other than myself except maybe a very small handful of people, which sounds like something you’d say to sound dramatic, but I mean that in all seriousness. Sometimes I wonder how much of it is my innate nature, and how deeply I am nurtured by the occupation I pursue. Tech as an industry is individualistic, fascinated by powerful individual role models who created a path beyond all odds and despite all costs. With leaders using wartime terminology in boardrooms, somehow glorifying the horrific destruction that is a war, to the chants of doing “whatever it takes” to win the arms race to technical supremacy.

I am not looking to question the culture,I myself am a child of, but I wonder, what would happen if I took upon a different career path. What would be my values. Currently I only care about my own success, have little regard to whatever the hell happens to society or even the people around me, I am deeply meritocratic, almost certainly sapiosexual and I work in an industry which has seen an influx of the most talented (and often ruthless) brains of the generation, and is capitalism incarnate it its most glorious ( and scary) manifestation in the 21st century. People (including yours truly) are driven by profits, by academic/professional glory, relationships are put on the sidelines and the most unlikely of alliances are forged for a chance to get a chance to make an “impact” on the world, and transform our society, often forgetting, that that’s not the only way to make an impact or even the most “impactful” one.

In contrast to this individualism, I wondered, what if I went into maybe something like the military, what would that make of me. I don’t have any idea of what goes inside a military life, but surely it involves a level of sacrifice of the individual identity? Atleast while watching a military parade, with people clad in the same uniforms (maybe decorated with varying level of paraphernalia indicating their rank), marching in groups to the same beat, their must be a strong sense of belonging to a larger group and of surrendering yourself to a cause, for the greater good. I don’t think when my job is to literally protect other people, I would care a lot about what petty concerns make of my daily headache in my current life, and obviously that life comes with its very own (and MUCH more physical) occupational hazards, but I was just wondering if I was drawn to the tech world because it suits my personality, or my personality has just been moulded to like the work I do.

Or what if I was a doctor? It feels like such a noble profession, though I know there is a LOT of stress and pain and occupational hazards that go into that lifestyle, but again, would that have made me a “better” person, would my personality be more caring, more sensitive and empathetic to the suffering of others, or would it have made me numb to it all, due to the constant overexposure to it?

I also often wonder about the total absence of social responsibility I carry, bordering almost to an apathy to whatever socio-political issues in the world around me, always having a feeling that all these problems are happening somewhere else in the world, and are not my problem. But what if I was working in an NGO, would I have been able to turn away my eye and pretend not to see anything wrong while staring right at the problems that are omnipresent around us. As an example, I am finding myself unable to look street beggars in the eye, because it somehow makes me very uncomfortable, and I can’t do any better than just pretend they don’t exist or I don’t see them, and that is so fucking brutal, because its only a coin flip which decides which side of the line I was born in, and it doesn’t take a lot of misfortune to even make me cross lines from one end to another in the future, and be on the receiving end of being pushed around in a world, that pretends to not see you, exist.

Maybe it's just the nascent emotional maturity developing inside me, as I am growing slightly older, although still being VERY young emotionally to be sensitive to a lot of issues, that my brain is making me think of all these things. It has affected the content I am consuming, the books I am reading (I am very much interested in history, political books, even though I didn’t like them before). I don’t know if its just a phase of life, where my brain is trying to figure out what its identity is, and how much of it, is just a result of occupational hazards in a mad industry?

Is 3 months left until becoming 24 years old too early for having a quarter life crisis?

Its funny how I used to go around saying to everyone that I am just a kid, how people treated me like a kid, and how that made it okay for me to be a kid. As time passes by, I feel less and less like a kid, and really, just plain old.

It’s easy to feel the world moving around at lightspeed, leaving you behind, in the dust, when you’re sitting alone in your room, working in a field (AI) which moves at speeds invoking relativistic effects, and in a city full of dust (Noida).

Is it normal, or is it just me, who spends most of his time, feeling stuck, with no fucking clue about what to do with his future (while people tell him, he’s sorted, what am I, an array?).

I am at that weird point in my career, where the things I can do are mostly individualistic in nature, and by definition not scalable, leading to a feeling of almost minimal impact, which was fine, when I was a student, and could always wait to enter the “real” world to do something impactful. While with the years stacking in experience, there is this growing desire to do something which I can be proud of (my current proudest professional acheivement till now is breaking something on the world’s 2nd most used search engine, ah…while I was employed there :P ). This leads to feeling stuck in my career as well, with no clear path ahead, the age old dilemma of being an IC vs a manager in the future looming closer and closer in the already big list of dilemmas inside my mind.

I have developed so many interests, and have tried picking up so many skills, but atleast at the moment, I am mediocre in all of them, and that adds to the feeling of being stuck, always waiting for somehow being able to crack open the box, (maybe by repeatedly banging your head against it lol).

I don’t know what the future holds for me, I don’t even know if I have a future, or even how many days it consists of, but I hope I am able to unstuck myself a bit, or else it might end up suffocating me and be my end.

But ah well —

The best case is I’m a rat who might be able to look up at the clouds once in a while
- I have no clue who said this, neither does google :P

While the title suggests that I should go back and do my work, we shall do just the opposite and rant the hell out of our thoughts in this lost corner of the virtual world, while we sit in a room lit up with fairy lights, blasting emo music (I like the way you kiss me by Artemas), only missing a cup of coffee to make things better (which on second thought I should make). So much for being a hypocrite eh?

Engaging in a favourite past time of mine, ie. overthinking about random things which have little to nothing to do with my future, while reading a book which is supposed to make me think (The Clockwork Universe), but only serves as an alternative to scrolling random shit on my phone owing to my attention span of a goldfish. I started contemplating the meaning of life, universe and everything, until I had a major realisation — I should just the shut the fuck up and do my work. Its that simple! Btw the shut up part comes from the fact that I spend most of my time talking to myself in my room in full volume, like the total crackpot I am.

I have a bad habit of over-analyzing my own actions, criticising them to the point of being often rendered paralyzed by the sheer brtuality my brain subject unto itself ( I think, therefore I am? Yeah Descartes, I think I have better odds if I don’t think :P ). I can observe my own actions from a detached perspective and figure out what I should have done in the moment, and why I didn’t do it, and what I should do to fix it….but do we fix it, nah. Instead we just rant about how unfair life is and yeah, just rant a lot.

I wonder if instead of being stuck in the past or trying to make sense of the present or predicting the future, it would be better if I just, shut the fuck up and did my work. Like really, just work and let things happen the way they are going to happen. I spend so much time trying to figure out what might be the best way to go doing about things or exploring random hacks that might make me better at something I want to skill up in, it might be instead better to just shut up, and put in some hours and get shit done?

If I look back at the past, then the moments when I just get lost in the work I am doing or the skills I am trying to develop, the times when I just tune out everything and work the hell out of my capacity, are the moments which end up making all the difference bit by bit. They don’t lead to a sudden metamorphosis, but instead slowly set up a chain reaction of events that can only be made sense of after the fact. In the moment it feels like life doesn’t make any sense, it feels frustrating, and I feel like ranting out to no-one in particular (hence this blog), but really I should just shut the fuck up and get my work done.

So we’ll just do that, shall we?