In some ways, I’ve had the most packed year of my life. Packed with Big Events. Till about 4 years ago, such Events happened regularly, almost at a cadence. I assumed this is what growing up meant. You grew up, learned, did things, things happened. And for the last 4 years, nothing really Happened for a while. Donald Trump got elected and for some, completely unrelated reason my life went into a sort of weird limbo. This year, that limbo, got frantic.
started a new job
had a kid
started my own consultancy
wrote a bunch
gained a lot of weight
lost only some of that weight
About 4 years ago, I realized that a lot of my problems basically had to do with me, my perception and my reaction. Surprisingly then, the solutions were also entirely under my control. This didn’t eliminate all the problems at all of course but it did get rid of a certain class of problems. This then meant that my attention could focus on the remaining problems and those problems now looked… bigger.
I am now close to the latter part of my early 30’s and it might surprise you to know that I have only recently certain Truths about the World
people might say that “you should say things as they are or as you see them” but they never actually want to
saying these things hurts people’s feelings and it is not the Truth or my idea of the Truth but the feelings of the people that actually decide things
it actually doesn’t matter how much people claim to be rational and appreciate thinking, the appearance of the thing is more important than the thing itself
The profound implications of these Truths have only begun to appear to me so late in life and when I share this Eureka moment with the people around me they think that either I’m playing the fool or they find it obvious and boring. Alas!
To make matters more complicated, I also realized certain Truths about me.
I actually AM missing out on something quite fundamental when relating to other people, I just haven’t been able to articulate that quite yet.
I assumed that other people are quite similar to me - turns out they’re not.
I seem to appear to others as a person with a bunch of qualities that I found quite surprising - intimidating, aggressive, a bit of a dick it seems like. I dug into this with the help of my colleagues and a workshop I attended and a lot of it appears to boil down to communication and tone. There was also a clear distribution between people who “knew me” and people who didn’t. Seemed to be 2 different people to these 2 groups. I’m now trying to figure out what the hell is actually going on. It might not be that deep but its something new for me!
Taking a break from this sort of rumination, question for you my friends - do you feel that you are a small person in a large body or a large person in a small body?
The Finnish language doesn’t have a future tense. In English you can say things like “I’m going to do X” but in Finnish you can only say “I do X”. The trivial and funny nihilistic interpretation is that Finns don’t see a future. This isn’t so funny considering its quite dark here 6 months out of 12, they’re not having many kids and the suicide rate is quite high.
The reality of course is that you just need to add context. In Finnish you’d say “Tomorrow, I do X” and there you have it, you’ve spoken about the future. This is quite an amusing category of errors that people seem to make.
“Oh look, there is no <property> in that (their) <system>, hence the <system> cannot even <do something we can>”
It is actually not so amusing considering what this ends up being applied to.
To philosophize means to be entirely and constantly troubled by and immediately sensitive to the complete enigma of things that common sense considers self-evident and unquestionable. - Martin Heidegger
Quotes are usually cringe but I like the above one. I don’t think I’m doing anything as fancy as philosophizing but ever since I was a child, I have found a lot of “common sense” things to be completely impenetrable enigma and sometimes thankfully also the reverse which has helped me quite a bit professionally (though communicating that becomes its own damn problem)
This year I attained a sort of more stable residency status in Finland. Again one of those instances that is difficult to understand till you have a “third world” passport and have spent the last decade just wandering country to country. Its been a few months and just remembering I have residency still is cause for a moment of cheerfulness.
Although, of course, in today’s political climate who knows if there is any such thing as stable.
There are a few things that happened over last year that I don’t talk about much.
The first was traveling back to Finland via transit in London. Landing in London, I was told the Finnish border had closed. The only choice I had was going back to where I came from or look for another destination that would accept me. It was the kind of nightmare for which I have a lot of data from back then but I don’t even feel like touching it. It wasn’t just me that wasn’t allowed back in the country - even Finnish citizens were not able to come back because no flights were allowed. I eventually made it back though and someday I’ll tell that story. I had 600 euros in my bank account at the time.
I say this because this year in particular has done my head in in so many ways. Always an anti authority person since childhood, I found myself having to argue with people to actually listen to *some* authorities this time around while watching the same authorities fumble over and over again to the point where incompetence became hard to distinguish from malice. Before you think this is some kind of anti government thing, my opinions on the behavior of the private sector when transitioning to remote work is even worse but that’s for another time maybe.
All I’ll say - I’ve discovered remote work works for me, I’ve achieved quite incredible things remotely and it is highly unlikely that I will ever go to an “office” 5-6 days a week ever again. This is also for another post.
You also can’t just “say” things anymore, not even to point at them and go “is this true?” or “oh look, if that were true, that would be interesting”. Maybe it was always this way and due to what I said earlier, I just didn’t notice. However, if you think cancel culture is only for “famous, controversial people”, you are very, very wrong. Weird weird weird political climate. Again, this might be obvious to a lot of you.
One of the advantages of having a really really packed year - take the dog out, day job, consultancy, spend time with kid relieve partner, take dog out, sleep - is that there is no space for the more lighter anxieties to take up space in your head. It really narrows your life to the essentials - eat, sleep, work and when you can, feel. Feeling takes up an incredible amount of energy (it can also provide energy)
The other thing that happened this year was that my baby’s delivery was a very difficult one. My kid had to spend 7 days in the neonatal ICU. Again, this is one of those things that’s very difficult to actually talk about but for very different reasons. I hope that one day we get to a world where no one has to see their infant covered in tubes, hooked up to machines, unable to breathe on their own. There is in me a circuit breaker that doesn’t even allow me to articulate and share how that feels.
Having your child surrounded by competent professionals who nevertheless say “We don’t know what happened” is also something that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
This year has been intense. Success? Failure? These have become far less important as categories, mainly due just how intense the year was. Most days I had energy barely leftover to even mindlessly stared at the television. What helped was re-visiting entertainment I had already enjoyed - mainly science fiction and fantasy. I’m working on putting up all my recommendations online but immediate ones are the Culture series by Iain M. Banks and all Sanderson books as well as the Demon Cycle by Peter V Brett.
I also lost my Amazon account that I had created 8 years ago. Well, “lost” - turns out that its the same account across multiple marketplaces which I wasn’t paying attention to. Getting it back has been impossible and at this point I’ve almost given up on it. A few hundred dollars of digital purchases just gone. At one level, I’m really really mad about it. On the other hand I feel like I’ve learned a really valuable lesson the hard way (which seems to be my preferred way of learning thank you very much).
I bought some crypto, I recommend you do some investigation if you haven’t taken the plunge yet. I also bought sagardubey.eth - it cost me a lot of money and I’m not sure why I did but I bought into a meme.
Generally though, having no time means it just makes sense to declare a digital jubilee - I hope you can find your way to declaring your own as well. It also now means that I really enjoy whatever I’m consuming and if I don’t then I just…don’t do it instead of guilting myself that I should be reading or I will read something more “productive” in the future.
(However, in case you’re looking for something new to read you can check out the substacks I follow at sagardubey.com - I also recommend following my friend Sonya at her website.)
The root of my information hoarding is actually hoarding against boredom. As a kid, boredom is what scared me the most. I was forced to take what seemed like interminably long train journeys and we couldn’t afford to buy books. I think I’m finally over that now.
Productivity also is a trap of course. It took me till forever to realize productive doesn’t mean impactful. If you look for impact you realize you have to actually figure out impact for what, who, when, how much. These are tough questions I’m now grappling with and I wish you good luck if you’re doing the same. It took me till <now> years old to realize how much I was doing things because I thought I was supposed to do them, that others were doing them and I was missing out (I mean I just bought crypto) by not doing them. Now, only to figure out what I actually want. Should be easy right?
If you’re bored and want to hear me ramble a bit, I spent a couple of hours talking to my friend Saurya about random, Indian history adjacent stuff here (very rambly conversation) and here (much more Indian history focused)