Life Alone

I often wonder about being other people, how life feels taking the decisions I would never take. It’s probably why I like reading biographies and listening to people monologue about themselves, because I can take a peek into their world. What it would be like to be tough enough to train for Olympic athletehood. How it would be to ride the rollercoaster highs and lows of a touring rockstar. How some people manage to find saying “penis” out loud hilariously funny after the age of 12.

I don’t personally have very strong values. I think I used to, but it’s probably been dissipating ever since I fell out of Christianity in middle school. Now I’m at the point where I’m not even sure what’s cool or not. Or rather, my bar for cool has been jumping between the two extreme of “literally anything is cool if you just say it is” vs “only the top 0.01% is cool otherwise everything and everyone else sucks”. Not having a strong baseline intuition for what is good or not makes decisions hard. So without that value signal, I’ve generally made choices based on what had the potential to expand the number of options I woud have in the future. Which means delegating knowing what I want to future-me. Not surprisingly, this has led me into higher education. I wouldn’t say the academic route is for everybody, but I guess I had sufficient curiosity, test-taking ability, and tolerance for next-few-years sacrifice that taking the time to explore this route has been overall satisfactory for me. Otherwise I might have spent years wondering the could-have-been’s.

So if I were to reexamine the major decisions in my brief 22-year life thus far in the frame of exploration vs exploitation, it’s pretty much all been exploration. I don’t mean exploration in a daily “what’s that over there?” basis, but more like “that’s something cool I could do/be/have” within months/few-years kind of way. I’ve reached the point where being in exploration mode is starting to have diminishing returns though, cause well, I’m towards the end of the runway for school and there aren’t too many paths I haven’t already considered before. It’s about time I try and make the most out of the me I’ve worked so hard to build up.

The problem is, I may have also inadvertently wired my brain to really want to seek new things. I’ve been noticing that I have less motivation to put effort into something that I already know where it’s headed. I want to be surprised. Run into something unexpected. Even though my experience tells me that I should stick to the things I already can do well or know are good. I mean, I don’t even know where I could go to try and surprise myself. But I just don’t get that much joy from doing the things I know.

Hey, this feeling is pretty normal in this day and age. I hate that response though. Normal is a low bar. It’s bad to compare yourself to others. And it’s just as bad to justify undesirable behavior with people who are “worse off”. Plus, population statistics is not that useful in application to one individual. It’s perhaps one way to ground yourself with what is within range of reason, but it’d smarter to stay principled in what you know you are capable of and what you want for yourself. Given you have detailed information about your thoughts and experience, it’s better to use that privileged information than some survey off the web to inform the decisions you should be making.

Now the future-me I’ve been delegating things to, is the me today. I ought to be the mature future-me I’ve been hoping for so that wrinkly future-future-me has things to be proud of herself for. But yesterday, I was the kind of person to hit snooze and sleep in late. Why should I expect so much from myself today? (It’s not “so much”, you spoiled little rat. Stop moping and go get your work done.)

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1/20/2026

I feel fine now. The world is way too big to try to fit into my head. The way to be happy is to be a part of something which I do understand.

Some worlds we are given, like family, and generational culture, but it’s up to you to choose. And I chose, somehow, wisely?

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10/13/2026

This file has been sitting here for a while. I was very embarrassed about this one, but I think it’s worth committing and remembering that I had felt this way.