Memories, or, what I'm currently thinking about
Lately I have been pretty harsh on myself. I am pushing my self to work and I am not allowing myself to have fun. Today I spent 30 minutes messing around with this awesome new terminal called WezTerm. I tinkered with the color schema, I tried to make it so that I can split, resize, and navigate around terminal panes just as how I would move around text. In the end I was quite delighted by what I have done. Is this going to make me abandon the built-in terminal of VSCode and magically more productive? Probably not. But I sure did have some fun.
It's been a while since I've had this kind of "nerdy" kind of enjoyments. I have fun when I'm around with my friends, but for the past few weeks, whenever I'm alone, I feel guilty when I allow myself to indulge in tinkering around with useless-but-fun technology -- messing around with the text editor, switching up my browser a little, perhaps customizing my terminal prompt... Doing so naturally poses the question of why. Why am I doing this. Who am I doing this for? The question brings up too many memories. Too many good ones. I used to have quite a good answer to this. I used to care about others, and the people I cared about used to be impressed by whatever it is I am doing. Now I either stopped caring about them or they have lost that interest in whatever it is that I'm doing. I can't stop reminiscing about the time in which such minutia and insignificant matters feel meaningful simply because I happened to care about someone who also cares about me. That way, every silly thing I did had a potential purpose. Now everything I do, I must do for myself, and I'm finding it harder and harder to take joy in the little stuff in life. Maybe it's because I'm too deeply influenced by the whole narrative around SF tech circle that tells you to just "do stuff" and "make things happen" instead of focusing on what's within. I believe that I have the ability to create a better future both for myself and for communities that I care about. As such I try to push myself to do real work, to drown myself in deep work and forget my own sense of identity. Only in doing work could I stop myself from overthinking and reminiscing about the past, and obtain some sense of self-respect. Adjusting the focus of my life from "curious exploration" toward "serious work" has served me well, and I intend to keep on putting work at the forefront of my life. But I sure do miss the joy of being genuinely curious about knowledge, and being able to happily spend a few hours of my life hacking on Rust, working on a thing that is inherently interesting and beautiful but would never contribute anything of value to the world. I've missed the beauty of the internal world, but would hurt should I venture there again.
How much of an impact can the tiny actions/inactions of a single person have on another? By a lot, is what I've learned from the past few months. I probably wouldn't be here writing this if a certain person (call her AZ) simply choose to not disappear tell me that everything is alright. I'd perhaps even be happy. I also wouldn't have spent so many hours working on the biggest project I've worked on in my life -- I'm proud of what I have built. So much of the trajectory of life could be determined by the whim of others. I might try to prevent uncertainties I all want, but ultimately such efforts are futile against the unbreakable RNG of life.
May be it's because I'm still a silly student making my way to college, but so much of life can happen in such a short period of time. In two years I've grown attached to people and I have detached, I've taken risks that came to fruition, ones that I regret, and ones that ended badly but yielded a unique journey. I'm taking action at a frequency I've never had in my life, and as such I would explore a wider state space of life. I would have experiences with amazing people that I could never have imagined. Would I care about or keep those connections, and would I be happy? I don't know.
Maybe I should have just stuck with the teaching of stoicism