disillusionment

008

Phew, back for week 8 of this newsletter. I fell off the rails for a little bit there, but I’m back and ready to get some words on the page.

What’s been on my mind recently? Well let’s start with a question:

“What would you do if you could tell nobody that you were doing it?”

This question has a few cousins:

“If money were no object, what would you do?” and “What feels like play to you but work for others?”

But that first question comes from Naval Ravikant, someone who’ve I’ve studied before but haven’t really gotten back into his material in quite some time. But like any good piece of content, sometimes things come back stronger than when you first read it - like the knowledge was sitting, ready for the day it really becomes top of mind.

It’s kind of a sad realization, but as much as I’ve enjoyed building things in code and solving problems through a programmer’s view of the world, ultimately I don’t think it’s what I want to do. I love having the know-how to build apps, games, scripts, and whatever - that has always felt like magic - but doing it in a corporate setting has really suppressed that love of expression.

I recently reconnected with an old teacher of mine, and in an email she asked “how are you? What are you studying?” to which - one mid-email existential crisis later - I replied: “I’m doing computer science. As much as I love coding though, I think secretly deep down I’m still looking for a way out from the corporate world.”

Talking to her for the first time in ten years really puts it in perspective just how quickly life goes from elementary school kiddo without many worries in the world at all to new grad corporate desk job worker. It also puts it in perspective just how real that decision of pursuing computer science is. She knew me by many other things: my childhood hobbies, my childish laugh, and my childlike curiosity in her classes.

CS will pay the bills and give me the stable finances I would love to have for me and the sake of my family, and as a bonus I like to code in general. What’s worse, I despise the nihilism in the computer science major, everyone crying about the job market and bitching about the same LeetCode x personal project burnout. At times, it feels like nobody really wants to be doing CS. I prided myself to be one of the people that really appreciated the beauty of thinking in code, and following a road that gave my parents the American dream.

But recently, I’ve been telling myself point blank that there’s no point in coping or lying to myself. If I’m being deadass, the road I’m on right now leads to corporate code where I spend the next 40 years building someone else’s product - someone else’s dream.

On paper, that’s not really something I have an issue with if I can make a decent living from that. The more bothersome part, to me, is admitting that I don’t take my personal dreams/compass nearly as seriously. As someone once put it to me, “why are you working harder for someone else’s dream than yours?”

To answer that question from earlier: what would I be doing if I could tell nobody about it?

The answer, as my instinct and soul puts it quite simply, is create.

The problem is that I don’t really have a clear vision of what kind of lifestyle that entails so A) it’s a knowledge problem. And B) I don’t have the systems and habits in place to get me closer to the goal of taking my dreams more seriously and doing things I want.

Writing, graphic design, video production, curation, code… so many avenues of attack and yet I can’t even block out 30 minutes a day to take myself seriously.

Another thing is that even though I want to create more, I feel like I always do stuff for external validation, or at least with an audience in mind. Part of the reason I’ve been able to keep up this newsletter is precisely because I haven’t told many people about it. Sometimes when I show things to other people and they don’t reciprocate the energy, it can be disheartening.

So even though I’m coming to terms that following this corporate path is not what I want to be doing for the majority of my working life, and in doing so becoming like many of my nihilistic classmates who make me sad, I still hold onto the fact that having a scarcity mindset is dangerous to the mind. I need to believe, sincerely, that there is an abundance of opportunity for me out there, and I just need to be clever enough to identify it and take myself seriously enough to pursue it with all my heart’s desire.

small updates

These weeks have really flown by for the summer. I’m at a point where I’m rationing my remaining time to all the people I want to spend time with before I go back head first into my final year of university.

It’s wild: every ‘at-bat’ I get with summer always starts with sheer dumb enthusiasm for the time ahead and always ends up with a bitter sweet departure, always wondering if I could’ve done more or rested more, or both.

But piece by piece, I’m figuring out who I want to be and how I want to show up to the world. Ultimately, I need to remind myself to be proud of the person I am now, and even more so of the person I plan to be - and just keep him in mind.

I still have lots on my bingo card I’d like to complete, but namely will be writing a small poem collection about the summer by the end of summer, and doing some of the more local stuff before I go on vacation.

My mind has been restless with all the stressors and activities I’ve been planning. I like my mind at rest when I can sit down, read, and smell the roses. So will be trying to get back to that.

Not a lot of updates on the reading or writing front tho. My earlier newsletters serve as a reminder to my ambition. I don’t like the dissonance between what I’m doing and what I sought to do, so will also be working to fix that.

Until next time! Evan