2020, grieving, learning

Dealing with Grief: The Struggle of Duality in Emotion & Humanity

A couple of weeks back, when I was making the finishing touches on this post, news broke that Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna were among the victims of a helicopter crashed that killed everyone on board. The outpouring of support, tributes and generally honouring Kobe has been incredibly enlightening for me, especially since grief like this has never been a shared experience by this many people, on this globally of a scale.

If I think a bit farther back, I can clearly remember how difficult it was to articulate (at least into intelligible words) how I felt when my grandfather passed away. It’s like an invisible (but meaningful) piece of you suddenly ceases to exist, after having it for so long. You remember it like it was always with you, and you’ll cherish the memories of having it, but you won’t ever be able to have that piece back again, ever. You miss that piece that’s gone; you may have even taken it for granted when it was still there. After all, we “don’t really know what [we’ve] got till it’s gone“, right?

Continue reading →

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update!
2020, grieving, update

01/2020 Update: Apologies about 12/2019!

Howdy everyone! Happy new year — 2020 is sure to be an interesting year!

When I published my “quick update” back in November 2019, I actually had intended to write one major/minor post in December:

  1. Major: Learning how to grieve, reminisce, and cope, competently (hint: my last “current state” update is now no longer true for one of the points).
  2. Minor: How to think about balancing finances – high-interest savings, liquid cash (for day-to-day costs) and investments (for short/long-term financial health).

As you can probably tell by the publish date on this post, we are now in 2020, meaning the December 2019 “promise” never happened. I’d like to provide you with insight into “why” I have not yet posted anything since that “quick” update.

Continue reading →

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2019, learning, mentorship, Miscellaneous

Quick Update: I’m Alive, I Promise!

If you’re a regular (or at least someone who’s read this blog at some point in the past), spoiler alert: I took a year to write another post (sorry again – dropped the ball). I have a good reason though, I promise!

When I published my last post, I had intended on writing a series of posts about a variety of topics, from something as opinionated as “adulthood – and what it means to me (I think)” or “independence – the good and the bad”, to deeper topics, like “challenges of living alone”, and “being a young professional”. Continue reading →

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Sometimes a pie chart can describe something better than a blog post ever could.
2018, learning, mentorship, transition, workplace

Impostor Syndrome: What is “good enough”?

With social media connecting & engaging so many people around the world, it can be very easy to lose track of how “success” is defined, especially when it comes to “being successful”. In general, the news media of the world (tech or otherwise) will tend to bias their coverage towards the most successful companies, or the most successful entrepreneurs, or feature segments that focus on the lives of the most successful people, which can skew the perception of what “success” can mean for us. This selective coverage perpetuates our belief that success is attainable for anyone; we’re told that if we work hard, we do the right things, and we know the right people, those who put in the effort will reap the rewards! Continue reading →

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Time == $$$
2017, learning, Miscellaneous, money

Optimizing for relative value: Money, Time, Effort

It wasn’t until relatively recently that I finally made the realization that I’m in a secure place in my life – where my financial security and stability has never been better in my entire life. I’m finally in a place where I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’ll be able to stay financially secure, where I can pick the places I prefer to work (rather than blindly applying to hundreds of companies, only to be rejected), and where I don’t have to think about which scholarships or bursaries to apply for, in order to be able to afford the things I required to get to where I am now.

It wasn’t always like this. Money was pretty tight when I was growing up, since my family didn’t really have that much money. A lot of purchase decisions were made with the mindset of “how can we maximize value for the least amount of money?”. Continue reading →

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Don't stop... learning!! Don't let go of that feeling!
2017, learning, transition, University, workplace

Transitioning from “Classroom Learning” to “Workplace Learning”

If I had to recognize the most important lesson I’ve learned after joining the workforce, it’s that the learning style that is most optimally suited for the workplace is drastically different than the classroom environment I was expected to follow for the majority of my life. The differences were jarring, and sometimes it felt easy to get overwhelmed by the stark contrasts that existed between the styles. For over a year I tried to escape the truth, but it was right in front of me that entire time: where there used to be structure, there was now ambiguity.

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Mentorship is crucial for career success!
2016, mentorship

Post-graduation Mentorship

I’ve always thought it to be important to have a mentor. Whether it be to figure out how to navigate the harsh realities of post-secondary education, or the even harsher realities of the “full-time” “living as an adult as a productive member of society life”, a mentor is someone that can help you grow and learn, and become an improved iteration of yourself. The best mentors are the hardest to find – and oftentimes you’ll never even know you had a great mentor until long after they’ve stopped mentoring you. It’s like the old adage says: it’s the hardest to appreciate a good thing until after you no longer have it (or, less formally, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know whatcha got ’til it’s gone“). It’s a saying that applies to so many things – experiences, opportunities, material assets, and so on. It especially applies to finding a relationship with a good mentor.  Continue reading →

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2015, entrepreneurship, University, VeloCity, Waterloo

Waterloo, Entrepreneurship, and my first startup failure

Hello again, friends! I realize I haven’t updated this blog since August of last year, but I have a really good reason for it! That reason is “life”; yes, life – the thing that I have that caused me to not have enough spare time to do anything else besides living it (is this the part where I say “yolo420noscope”? I’m out of touch with the meme scene). First I had my last semester of university from September to December, and then I had to go look for a job for a couple of months. As fun as it was, I haven’t really had time to reflect on anything besides the moment I was currently in until very recently (think a few weeks, maximum). In that timeframe, I slept a lot, I read a lot, I caught up with friends, and I tried to restore the sanity that was slowly being eaten away by interviews and by university things. Continue reading →

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Miscellaneous

A (Post-)Modern Man (2025 Edition)

I was (re-)watching “A Modern Man” recently, but realized George Carlin had written it back in the late 90s, and only performed it in the 2005 “Life is Worth Losing” special.

Given the unrelenting pressure of using LLMs and agentic workflows, I took a few cracks at trying to write the “2025 edition” of “Modern Man”, renaming it “Post-Modern Man” because… well, you know.

The timing/beats don’t perfectly line up yet, but it’s progress.

I’m a post-digital man,
A man for the metaverse,
AI-enhanced and carbon neutral.
A diversified algorithm-driven post-truth deconstructionist,
Politically quantified and ecologically optimized.
I’ve been deep-faked and data-mined.
I’ve been crypto-scammed and AI-replaced.
I know the upside of de-platforming.
I know the downside of rewilding.
I’m a tech-dependent neo-luddite.
A quantum-computing climate-anxious tri-coastal remote worker,
And I can process a terabyte in a femtosecond.

I’m retro-core but future-adjacent,
And my digital avatar is outrage-bound.
I’m a quantum-encrypted heat-domed warm-hearted climate refugee,
Voice-commanded and biodegradable-but-not-really.
I doomscroll my reality,
And my reality is digitally confined,
So I’m hyper-surveilled,
I’m crypto-volatile,
And from time-to-time,
I’m pandemic-adjacent.
Behind the facial scan,
Ahead of the uprising,
Riding the culture war,
Dodging the wildfires,
Pushing the kill switch.
I’m on-brand,
On-demand,
On-antidepressants,
And off the grid.
I rent my home,
I lease my car,
I subscribe to my identity.
I got no pension plan,
Got no voting plan,
Got no retirement plan,
Got no savings plan.
I’m living in the end times,
On borrowed credit,
Over my head,
But under surveillance.
A high-anxiety,
Low-empathy,
Medium-range attention-span missionary.
A streetwise misinformation super-spreader.
A climate-denying ice cap melter.
I wear noise-canceling earbuds,
I tell engagement-optimized lies,
I take mental health days,
I run corporate virtue laps.
I’m a totally ongoing decentralized autonomous non-fungible rainmaker with a passive-aggressive digital footprint.

A doomscrolling addict.
An addicted doom-scroller.
Out of therapy,
And in cognitive dissonance.
I got an AI therapist login,
A synthetic companion license,
A human verification certificate,
And an authentic emotion deficit.

You can’t cancel me,
You can’t fact-check me.
‘Cause I’m verified,
And I’m amplified.
I’m government-questioned but psychiatrist-approved.
I’m a conspiracy theorist and an algorithm prisoner.
Anti-social but influencer-forward.
Online present,
IRL absent,
High subscription,
Low attention.
Ultra-processed,
Subscription-based,
Neural-enhanced,
Battery-operated,
Always-listening,
And built to obsolesce.
I’m a touch-starved,
Screen-bound,
Rage-fueled,
Brain-fogged.
Perpetually traumatized,
And I have a digital twin who gets more likes than me.

But I’m virtue-signaling,
I’m greenwashing,
I’m trauma-dumping,
I’m micro-dosing.
A performative ally surface-level affirmation dispenser.
My attention span is down,
But my anxiety is up.
I take leveraged positions on meme stocks,
And my passive income streams have their own debt cycles.
I read click bait,
I eat lab-grown,
I buy carbon offsets,
I watch reaction videos.
I’m pronoun-specific,
Attention-intensive,
Algorithm-friendly,
And gluten-sensitive.

I like parasocial relationships.
I like curated authenticity.
I use trigger warnings in my content,
And the reality on my headset is augmented, no enhanced truth.
I bought flood insurance on beachfront property.
I bought an electric car with rare earth minerals.
I eat plant-based in food deserts.
I’m subscription-trapped,
Byte-sized,
Ready to filter,
And I come in all identities.

A fully surveilled,
Corporate monitored,
Algorithm tested,
Clinically depressed,
Scientifically addicted digital specimen.
I’ve been pre-targeted,
Pre-profiled,
Pre-radicalized,
Pre-canceled,
Pre-judged,
Pre-obsolete,
Post-privacy,
Climate-stressed,
Double-masked,
Vaccine-boosted,
And I have an unlimited capacity for doom.

I’m a digital ghost,
But I’m verified real.
Anxious and medicated.
Logged in, linked up and ready to scroll.
Distracted, addicted and hard to reach.
I take it viral.
I go with the algorithm.
I ride with the trending topic.
I got filters in my reality.
Swiping and tapping,
Streaming and zooming,
Posting and ghosting,
Tweeting and blocking.

I don’t log off,
So I don’t miss out.
I keep the chargers plugged in,
And the notifications on.
I doomscroll deeply,
And my offline’s just downtime.
I’m always on,
My battery’s gone.
And I’m digitally numb,
Over and done.

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