It's technically even but it's odd in the sense that it isn't special at all. That way it is probably not peculiar at all since there are more non-special things than there are special. If it was the inverse then the concept of being special would cease to make sense.

26 here doesn't discretely come right after 25 as if it just appears one day, although it does seem that way. On the contrary, 25 was slowly and continuously flowing into the next. It's not unprecedented though. There have been a lot of 25s that became 26s before. So much in abundance that people attach meaning to the general concept of being a 26.

This 26, despite looking like a lot of 26s, is mine though. Irrevocably mine. For a little while, all I can possibly see is 26.

The number 26 itself has nothing going for itself. It's mostly inert, harmless (I hope), unitless (almost!), and mouldable. It can lie on different figures like circles, lines, or road signs. This particular 26 that we are all now familiar with lies on a specific line segment. At least it looks like a line segment from one perspective, it might be a finite non-connecting curve. It has a known specific start point and an unknown end point.

It's unique.

-

I wonder if 18 would look at 26 and think it's in anyway better.

When you're 18 you think there are 6 things that you need to do. Things that will make you happy. Things that will make you someone you're proud of. Over the succeeding numbers, you will probably lose a couple of things and you will add a couple of things and then they will become your things. Things that will bring value to you. Things that are supposed to bring value to you.

They are old things though, standing on rickety foundations of juvenile energy. A lot of energy that doesn't understand or hasn't figured out what its body wants.

But looking ahead is not entirely possible for 18, so 26 gets to take a call on what 18 feels about itself (what a toxic relationship).

Looking back itself isn't the beacon of clarity and wisdom as 18 thought it would be. The figuring out of value consumes as much as it potentially produces.

Looking back from the surface of 26, entire numbers are crudely captured in blurred learnings and misplaced relations. Events fumbled and conjoined with emotions to such an extent that 26 has no way to prove the reality of them. It's awfully blurred behind a one-way moving plexiglass that stops 26 from going backwards or do anything even, except close its eyes and see there.

So all it ends up seeing are these checkpoints that anchor how the distance from one point to another on this rocky finite non-connecting curve can be perceived.

When a new friend, a 23 from another non-connecting curve, asks 26 about 18, 26 unabashedly embellishes and misremembers 18 and presents all this growth. Not to deceive or manipulate but the checkpoints are all that can be seen by 26. And when you can't see something clearly, you start making up things that you believe or hope are true. These checkpoints should have some meaning. Or even better a connection to the next similarly coloured checkpoint.

What 26 doesn't realize, while sitting with a 23 from another non-connecting curve, is that a lot of times you just do things and then the day ends. It's nice to have nice things, you know? But it's a day either way. It's a day well spent. Or well, a day spent at least.

I hope this day 26 has with this 23 from another non-connecting curve is worthy of a checkpoint. Because at the most that's all I can hope for. For 26's sake. And maybe even for 23's. Because even though these checkpoints will eventually look blurry and distant behind plexiglass, they are there. In all their local glory.

And eventually when 26 and 23 morph into 31 and 29 (the delta is not a whole number), and the curves are distant from each other, so distant that it doesn't make sense for the curves to intersect again. At least 31 and 29 will have this mutual checkpoint.

Right now, my 26 has some time to be a lot of things. To define itself any way it wants. And be selectively misremembered by any number that succeeds it. Or any other non-connecting curve that happens to be with it.

At the end of the day, I guess 26 is just a lot of words, with thin metaphors and self-indulgent posturing. So pretty much just like the other 25 before it.

Happy birthday to me I guess.

ps. today is not my birthday

-

Few of these are things that I've heard and internalized but just don't remember from where or whom so not all (or maybe any) are novel.

• You can’t edit a blank page.

• It's okay to have a panic attack while you are having a panic attack.

• Ask anyway, the worst they can say is no (which is the default state anyway).

• Get comfortable with being bad at things, especially difficult as you get older.

• Clean your house before leaving for more than 3 days.

• Don't suffer future pain.

• Only buy what you need. Sell or donate what you've stopped using.

• You can't be heard if you're not communicating.

• If you want to understand a problem, start solving it.

• Your job title doesn't limit you. You are allowed to animate even if you are a database engineer.

• New information should allow for change and not for bitterness and emotional rejection.

• Let _being right_ be a coincidental side-effect of discourse and nothing more.

• There are two main types of discussions – exploratory and action-based. You can't contribute anything valuable without doing your research first in the latter.

• Be nice twice.

• Don't remember when and what you gifted someone (whether it's a compliment, your time, or a physical thing). Relationships are not transactions.

• If a trivial amount of money can solve a problem or dilemma, then spend the money.

• Tell people you love that you love them.

• Acknowledge, apologize, and try to learn from your mistakes.

• Don't guilt people over their mistakes after they apologize. Express, listen, forgive, resolve together, and let it go.

• In a romantic relationship, respecting the other's freedom is more important than passion.

• Keeping regrets are a waste and a precursor to bitterness. Either you wanted it then, or you made a mistake. Try to learn from both.

• The only thing you lose by not asking a question is a chance to chip away at your ego.

• Keep clothes and shoes till they are comfortable and not torn. Always wear them clean.

• If you get angry or outraged, give it five minutes before you react

• Understanding your own value and principles helps in breaking FOMO.

• Don't assume a person is stupid just because they seemed so yesterday.

• If relationships seem like business obligations, either sort it out or stop investing.

• Action comes before motivation.

• Seek to understand and not to project your own current beliefs.

• Delete most old emails, photos, and personal chats.

• Keep photos, letters, emails that have thought, fun or sentimentality behind them.

• If you need one, seek a therapist on the day you're feeling relatively good.

• Travel just to meet your friends, the location is mostly irrelevant.

• Try to do the obvious thing first.

• Feeling deeply about something or someone doesn't mean you have to feel it intensely.

• Don't be afraid to question a feeling just because you've been feeling it for a while.

• If you can, support and sponsor people that provide value to you.

• Struggle often leads to fulfilment.

• Don't trust your gut if you have little to no experience within the field.

• stay hydrated.

(my attempt at getting a stick figure to shrug)

I have been feeling pretty disillusioned with a lot of things in life right now. I've been living alone and isolated for the past year due to covid. But not exactly isolated due to always being digitally connected. It eventually makes me get overcharged and burn out. This feeling of being burnt out feels bizarre to me. Especially since I haven't been overworking and my productivity hasn't been the greatest over the last year.

The sun looks pretty, peeking over the mostly-still delicate water, rippling because of four ducks going willy-nilly from here to there.

I struggle with understanding my limitations while producing something. I have thought about this before. Our limitations. I have believed for some time that realising our limitations can make us understand our values. And eventually, make us push on the walls of those limitations.

Why does a swan look supremely graceful perched atop the edge of the lake? Where is its blog post? How much code did it write today? It would be quite disingenuous of me to say that humans are exactly like aquatic animals(birds?). But I have been thinking about what I consume and how much of it do I grind and cut and inhale every other minute. Understanding my limitations while consuming is as (or more) important as producing.

Hurtling between different water bodies without falling in love with the current lake. Munching a patch of grass whole while blasting distracted music all the time. Worried about what the other more successful ducks are doing. Binging on the motivation drugs that the other rockstar geese are peddling. The joy that I seek is always two inches away from where I can be right now.

My youthful (or bitter old) hubris interferes with the clarity of seeing things for me. I hope that understanding my limitations is not another hack or something that might make me feel morally superior. It's kind of calming and terrifying at the same time. It's calming to experience this lake for a day. This can also be a red herring because it very closely resembles running away.

But right now, I need this. I feel burnt out from the constant barrage of everything all the time. This exceeds my limitations to consume. This exceeds my limitations to feel. I don't want to abandon everything and live in the wild. I don't want to experience everything either. Right now, I want to watch the ducks slowly swimming. And the one in the front slightly lowering its dark blue neck, opening its washed-out yellow-grey beak and letting some water in to quench its thirst.

TLDR: I love making a lot of plans but I always fail, so here’s a plan and this time I won’t fail, I promise. And also a whole lot of extraneous personal details.

Today is the end of two weeks of vacation where I did not go anywhere (lockdown due to corona) and I concluded another set of failed goals. I love making plans, it is lovely to put pen to paper as you look at the week/month/year and make plans, be all methodical about it, maybe tell a friend or two. And then I proceed to distract myself with a billion streams of consumption. And then I feel sad.
Sigh.

I wrote the first post on my blog in 2019 Jan and I thought I would write regularly after that. Well, that didn’t happen. I ended up writing just twice. My fears of committing to a complete post were true and I ended up slacking again. I have a lot of ideas so I am hoping this post can act like a reboot.

Taking stock of the past year or so

Moving to Germany
I moved to Germany last year in May and it is about to be a year since I have been living here away from my home in India. I was fortunate to get such an opportunity and I like living in Hamburg. A lot of the last year went away in adjusting and getting better technically. Especially the 3 month period of August-October was quite productive where I ended up working and learning a lot.

I wanted to write but never sat down to write but they were more ideas that I thought about in the shower and never sat down to flesh out. I put poetry on the backburner too as I was blanking out more often than not. I broke up with my girlfriend of two years while I was in Hamburg somewhere around July. It was terrible and I ended up overdosing on the distraction train more than ever. I was doing busy work all the time and everything felt under-stimulating.
Towards the latter part of the year I was moving aimlessly and hurtling at great speed towards nothing in particular, maybe the end of the year(?). It is quite fascinating how easy it is for a time period to become a blur when you have no emotional anchors as checkpoints.

Trip back to India and a week in Leeds
November onwards a lot of trips were planned that weren’t solo trips. I met one of my closest and oldest friend, Gyani in November for three days in Tbilisi. I ended up having a great time. Especially having coffee at night at a weird overhanging table at this open-air makeshift cafe that was overseeing old Tbilisi at night. It was quite beautiful.
I went back to India in mid-November for 16 days. I surprised my parents and it was fun to be back. I spent most of my time with my family and my close friends, Anusha and Sumit. It was a lot of quality time that I spent with them all.
Leaving India was more difficult this time around than in May. Last time there was a lot of nothingness that I was going into, which is a good feeling for me; this time I knew what I was going back into(cue intersecting lines are sadder than parallel lines). Add the downward slope I had sat on before coming to India and I wasn’t looking that keenly onto my return.
I was back and Hamburg was in Christmas spirit, it was a fun time and the month was not as bad as I had thought initially. I wasn’t homesick as I feared I would be. It was still a blur, I was moving towards nothing and I ended up either drinking too much or wasting my time on social media. It is completely okay to not be productive all the time, but a lack of joy along with it made me pretty miserable.
On Christmas, I sat on the plane for Leeds for a week-long stay with my friends Sid and Shridhar. It was some of the best time I had in some time. We stayed at his student accommodation, a lot of his friends were away and it was the holidays, and we ended up not going out much for sightseeing or to some other city (although we did make a failed plan for Liverpool).
I did not pressure myself to work or be productive. I watched a lot of football with them, we would joke around all the time, or go down and play pool or just talk in general. I would wake up and work on some songs or write something. One night I sat up and worked on Kreise.
I think the reason I enjoyed it so much was because I felt no rush to go somewhere or do something and I didn’t feel isolated as I had started feeling in Hamburg. I spent New Year’s Day in London going around looking at different aquatic life at Sealife and just walking around in the city.

A new year and back in Hamburg
It was bittersweet being back but it was a new year and my mood generally looks optimistically towards what I can do at these ‘new starts’. I made resolutions for the year. I like making plans, my plans never work out but I am an optimistic person. I thought that this time it will be different, I will make realistic goals, I will break down those goals and follow up over regular intervals. These were my realistic goals:

• Read 24 books (2 per month): A reasonable goal but I didn’t read any till March. It’s looking up though as I am at 4 now.

• Write 12 articles (1 per month): I am hoping that I pick up steam after this. (Another plan 🙃)

• Write a poetry book: The plan was to organize my thoughts, write a lot of poetry by March-end and then start fleshing out the ideas and concepts. I had written one poem by March-end. April was a little better in this regard but this is not a modest goal and I was way too optimistic back in January.

• Try to be nicer, start journaling for behaviour retrospection, start meditating: All these are sort of related and I have completely failed so far. I don’t maintain a journal, I have meditated once so far.

I quickly realised that these were lofty goals and I was trying to take on too much. Along with this, my mental health was not that great and the goals put more pressure on me than helping me out.

February and the start of accountability
In February, Gyani and I started telling each other what we would do the next day and follow up at the end of the day to stay accountable. I hope to write more about this and what accountability means to me in a future blog.
I think this kind of exercise can only consistently work if you do it with someone who is close to you and wants good for you at heart. I think we did this every day in February although we missed here and there in March as Covid19 started disrupting routines and completely halted in April.
I almost always failed most of my tasks or if I did end up doing the tasks, I was not consistent enough for it to drastically affect my work ethic. Despite all this, I think it positively pushed me to aim to be better(I still kept having self-doubts where I hated myself for failing the smallest of tasks). Talking to a close friend about how we can improve and failing in a safe zone is an amazing thing.

Corona and isolation overdrive
On March 16th, Hamburg went in lockdown and the future of my company was in jeopardy as my company started haemorrhaging money due to corona causing a loss in business.
It has been over 50 days now since I have spoken to anyone in person. Apart from the occasional Danke Schön and Tschüss with the supermarket checkout person. The first month was horrible. I was constantly feeling isolated and overly anxious due to people dying everywhere and being worried about the well being of my friends and family.
It got a bit better in the latter part of April as I went into the start of my two-week vacation. This was the freest time available I had since I was a little kid maybe. There was no pressure to meet anyone (I did spend a chunk of my time on calls with people though), no places to go to, no office work, nothing. I made another plan (who would’ve thought) and I was measured and ensured that I can be realistic in what I can achieve this time. I achieved zero goals completely.

• Complete the Stanford Web Sec course: I ended up watching 4 episodes

• CI (Gyani and I had decided to challenge each other in making a Continuous Integration server): I scrambled at the end to make a server but didn’t make any frontend.

• GuitBetter (A Guitar chord change practice app): Didn’t even code for one minute on this

• Write 2 blog posts: Wrote 0 (1 if you count this). Although to be fair to me, I did end up writing a lot of material and should be in a better state to continue working and posting more.

• Organize my thoughts (Over the years, I have written a lot of ideas, poetry, rants on different apps and notebooks. Wanted to make it more central): I did end up working on this, for some time but nowhere where it was enough.

• Finish 3 songs: I did end up finishing the music for two of those and have the music almost down for the third one. I played a LOT of guitar over the two weeks and it was joyous playing and composing.

• Read every day: I did read every day except the last 2 days.

• Do some life thinking: I have no new insights about myself or life. I envisioned that I would sit in the park for hours at end and understand myself more. (Naivete is nice)

The last two weeks weren’t a complete disaster I suppose after I write it down like this (maybe journalling is a good idea).
I still think that all the goals were achievable and I could have skipped on the garbage youtube videos that I saw. I feel that I have failed still. I know this isolation inducing environment isn’t a very healthy time for soul searching or a proper vacation, but there was a possibility and I think that makes me be harder on myself.

What’s the point of all this?
I don’t know that very clearly.
Something needs to change though. Or maybe punching up to pull yourself up while regularly falling is not such a bad thing. I always wait for something to change drastically, for me to gain some insight, have a life-changing epiphany, for me to do some soul searching and hoping I come out a different person at the end of the search but I don’t think that works.
I think it is just about continuing to try and fail in most of what you do. And over time you get sort of better in certain things and grow as a person. It is like when you were a kid and some relative would visit you after many years and say how tall you’ve grown, but to you, you were the same.
I would love to have a life-changing revelation, that can solve my work ethic issues, my mental issues or make me understand myself. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) it doesn’t work that way. It is kind of boring when you think about it. Fail and be consistent at failing and then you get kind of good at something.
Boring is very difficult though. And it is really hard to get through too while you constantly feel bad about failing.

I am hoping that I end up writing more. Finish those ideas and post more. I hope it is not as boring and personal as this one 🙂

This is something that I wrote for myself sometime back. I hope it helps someone out there.

Rejection is not directly dependent on the value that you bring.
Don’t let it snowball into making you feel worse about other things. Someone rejecting you for a feature in their poetry magazine or a date does not mean that you suck at cooking. It does not even necessarily mean that you suck at poetry or are an unwanted partner.

Realise that events are not one dimensional light beams in time. There are a billion external bulbs and lights that influence a single event. Sometimes things are not a great fit for a myriad of reasons. Feeling bad about it consistently will slow your growth and stagnate you. I have learnt that rejections provide the biggest source of learnings if I allow it to happen.

Acceptance is a byproduct of doing what you are interested in and enjoy doing. If you keep chasing acceptance as an indicator of your value then it will always be dependent on all those random bulbs glowing at the same time, all the time.

Don’t fret over originality so much.
Every act of creation derives itself from its creator and the environment which shaped that creator. Everyone starts out creating by copying things or being heavily inspired by someone. Over time, it becomes a mixture of several influences that becomes indistinguishable from the creator.

I have realised that the core reason for feeling bad for not creating something novel is our ego. Feeling like an imposter makes us uncomfortable and attacks us personally. Take a step back from yourself and create. There’s a lot to learn from your influences. All great guitar players started by learning the covers of their heroes. All painters started by mimicking what they saw around. Don’t mistake the result of creation to be validation but that of the existence of the work itself.

This is not to be mistaken for not chasing originality. Try your best to be novel, but acknowledge your roots. Remember, we can push the boundaries to new areas, but we can’t make them. This realisation is rooted in humility and dedication to your work.

Society’s insistence on validation will drive you crazy.
Society pushes you to believe that work and art are completely black and white and what one group says dictates the quality of what you create. This spawns a cycle of seeking outward validation and gauging our value based on that. This happens because of the culture of idolisation. We appreciate someone, a friend, someone on the internet and we correlate everything that they say with a blanket bar of quality that we need to aspire to.
Recognise when to separate appreciation from the biased need for validation. The need for validation exacerbates insecurities whether you get validation or not. Remember, confidence isn’t feeling better than others or better than some imaginary level, confidence is not having to compare at all.
Work on growing your understanding of your craft. This understanding will dictate your progress. It is highly improbable to grow meaningfully without this.

Don’t get sucked in creation purgatory.
I have had a thought with me for a long time that drives me to work —

“Consumption is despicable, creation is beautiful.”

The reasoning behind this is that too much consumption is gluttony and makes us lethargic and prone to comparison - with the craft that I admire and consume. But this also has the potential of driving you crazy and make you feel shit at the end of the day. This directly lowers your confidence in yourself.
It is okay to let go and sit and consume what makes you feel good. Appreciate the need for consumption. Can’t produce anything on an empty stomach/soul.

Create meaningful relationships with people that are away from personal bias and vested interests. Sometimes you will feel worthless and fail to see the value in yourself. Don’t look for validation on your work from them. Look for reassurance to continue.
Pursuing a skill or craft is not an easy thing. Don’t let ephemeral feelings come in the way of persistent effort.

Take a deep breath.