What’s Been On My Mind 2019

Just gonna try to catalogue some of the things I've thought about in various categories, but also things I did? Pretty disjointed, but alas.

Work

Working is kinda awful and I feel mostly deceived in the idea that "if you do what you love you'll never work a day in your life"
- The funny part is that I really like my job, and I couldn’t ask for a better group of coworkers/manager. And I like the actual work most of the time too. I just feel that that there’s always other things I’d rather be doing.
- Work as a source of identity both makes sense and is kinda sad
  - Objectively most people spend more time working than they do doing anything else so I get it
  - On the other hand unless you're in some position where you’re totally doing what you want to do and have complete autonomy (and would be doing identical work even if you were at another company or on your own), a job kinda is just a job.
  - Maybe I’m just holding on to some weird baseless fantasy that there’s something cool and fun and creative I could be doing with my time instead
Learning seems kind of overrated, or at the very least, treated too nebulously
- A lot of people cite the idea that "as long as you're learning something” things are good or something
- Who cares if you're learning about something you're not interested in/things that are not really transferrable
Crazy that employers can credibly expect you to care about the mission of goals of a company the amount people who have orders of magnitude more to gain than you do
Class consciousness in the workplace is mostly lacking -- selling the mission to people who have nothing to gain from the success of the company somehow works
The idea of getting a big fancy job that requires a lot of hours and a lot of caring and also pays well doesn’t really meet my goals of being able to not work.
- The type of people who succeed after starting companies or whatnot keep working after they’re rich, which seems like it defeats the point of being rich (total freedom) to me.
  - maybe this is just the people who post about it
Seems like a lot of my friends have the same kind of existential dread where they don’t know what they wanna do/feel like they are wasting their time and their potential. 🤷‍♂️
- Working at a unicorn/FAANG isn’t enough to make people feel fulfilled, unsurprising

Travel

Went a lot of places this year, took a lot of PTO. Don't know why I even bothered including this, but eh why not.
- Iceland
  - Really pretty if you’re into that type of thing (I’m definitively not)
- Japan
  - Call me a weeb.
- Eastern Europe (Prague, Vienna, Budapest)
  - Very similar to each other.
  - Food was eh
  - Bars are excellent
- Peru
  - Beautiful place, Lima is a modern day city, and Cusco really is nice. Can get really fucking cold.
- Texas!
  - This was somehow the trip I came away most excited from. Dallas Fort Worth Airport is one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been.
  - Everything really is bigger
  - The Alamo is dope.
- Chicago
  - Really really nice in the summer
- India
  - Developing like crazy
  - Really polarized, Mumbai is a different world from Jaipur and other places my family is from
- UAE
  - Dubai is one big shopping mall
- San Diego
  - The only place in the states besides NYC and perhaps Berkeley I could see myself staying for a while.
>Week long trips are exhausting.
There is a definite difference between vacation and travel and I need to do more vacation in 2020.
Hoping to move abroad for a few years between 2020 and 2025. Doubt I would settle anywhere else (I’m way too culturally American to ever be anything more than an expat), but I think it’d introduce some novelty into my life

Goals/Future Planning

Hard to set tangible goals now -- timescale is long
Have a lot of goals for this upcoming year nonetheless
- Consume less ephemeral content (podcasts, articles, etc)
- Consume more freestanding content (books, movies)
- Write more shit, maybe even eventually in paragraphs
- Bring back my dumb power rankings
  - really stupid but a lot of fun and a nice little fun project to sink my teeth into
  - Also helps me maintain relationships with the few people whom I like enough that I wouldn’t mind talking to them about the optimal thermometer temperature for 45 minutes.
- Drink more beer
- Spend less time in bed
  - Spend probably ~12 hours in bed per day, gotta stop that
- Play more tennis or maybe pick up squash

Health/Wellbeing

Definitely the weirdest year yet insofar as mental health goes
- Had some mood swings first half of the year, and a couple months of borderline manic anxiety
- mostly standard anxiety second half, mood stabilized a lot more
- Felt really good recently!
Debated seeing a therapist a bunch this year to clear the air (I, and a number of people I trust believe everyone should see one) but alas I am too cheap to pay for it
Slept probably >8 hours a day and was still perpetually tired, but very happy to be sleeping/waking up without an alarm.
- Slept really late (between 2 and 3 every day), but this is the only reasonable way to get 2-3 continuous, uninterrupted hours to myself per day, so will probably continue.
Started playing tennis again! Really really happy about this.
Relationship with alcohol became way less adversarial in 2019
- Enjoy good beer now and look forward to drinking it
- Drink less than before and am intoxicated very infrequently, but enjoy it more than ever
- *Stomach feels like shit all the time

Attitude/Becoming An Adult

Biggest attitude change this year has been realizing almost all bad things that happen are funny with time, and if you think about it with that lens, bad things are actually kinda good.
- Examples include: small injuries, almost all inconveniences (the more inconvenient the funnier), small relationship problems, etc.
- Ex: “got this cool 4 hour layover how sick is that"
Meeting new people is awful and extremely difficult
- Guess I have to get better at this in 2020, not sure how.
Important for me to have real close friends in your life, and I’m glad I made some new ones in 2019
In the same vein, over time you sort of have to prune your peripheral friendships and I’m glad I’ve got some friends who, regardless of distance, I’m able to stay in frequent contact with
Found myself enjoying spending more time alone than ever
Used to feel anxious about traditional life trajectory deadlines “married by 30, kids by 32, move to suburbs, etc” but now realized I actually don’t want any of that shit and have no problem telling people to stay the fuck out of my business in that regard
Did way less things I wasn't excited about, which I'm really hype about.
Novelty is the thing that keeps things interesting, gets harder to come across as you get older
- Mostly requires making unconventional decisions

Misc

Really confused why some types of food are regional when they don't seem to be that difficult to make
- Ex: Mexican food in California, Pizza in NYC
- Seems like should be replicable?? Do not understand why this doesn't work

Content Consumption & Other Favorites

Movies
- Watched a lot of movies this year (really the first time I could ever say that) but my favorites
  - Parasite
    - Themes really appealed to a lot of what's been on my mind
    - Cinematography is really really good (and I'm not normally one to notice that)
    - Motifs and shit were really well done
  - Knives Out
    - Well thought through
    - Really good dialogue
TV shows I watched
- You
  - Trash
- Riverdale
  - Even more trash, but honestly amazing that it can be so bizarrely written. Would recommend watching if you like things that make no sense at all.
- Silicon Valley
  - Repetitive as hell, but enjoyed it.
Music
- Listened to a ton of Soulection radio & Anderson Paak this year
- Feel like I’ve never been less on top of what's new though, but oh well
Books I Read
- Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
- Super Pumped by Mike Isaac
- War on Peace by Ronan Farrow
- Dignity by Chris Arnade
Best Beer I drank in 2019:
- Curtains III Sour IPA - Hudson Valley Brewing
My Favorite 3 Meals in New York City:
- 4 Emperors at Roberta’s
  - Get the takeout and sit in the beer garden. My strongest NYC rec.
- Fried Dumplings at 88 Lan Zhou Handmade Noodle
- Spicy Tuna Mazemen at YUJI Ramen