• Getting engaged.
• Buying a home.
• Getting married.
• Finding a new job.
• Developing my first grey hair.

It became apparent this year that personal fulfillment and growth are critical to long term well being. To move in this direction I started:

• Running, seriously.
• Asking why so as to develop a deeper understanding of myself and my motivations.

In 2025 I’m looking forward to:

• Running my first marathon.
• Making my house feel like a home.
• Working to find personal happiness.

This is a constant source of frustration for me. In the abstract, it is the struggle of not wanting to waste a resource (the object and the initial expenditure) which then translates to a genuine loss of happiness — the inverse of what the object was designed to bring. In the tangible, it is the Palomino Blackwing that is just smaller than my palm, but still long enough to write, or the last pages of a notebook that aren’t enjoyable to write on, but are between me and finishing.

This is a daily struggle. Where is the line between joy and practicality, and how do I handle this delineation?

My solution is suboptimal, but emphasizes what I find personally important: joy over practicality. That means I dispose of the pencil when it is too short and hurts my hand to write, and that I start a new notebook when it is no longer enjoyable to write in the current one. It means that I sacrifice some portion of an item’s utility: I’m finishing before the end of the its lifespan.

This is what I am trying to internalize: not the idea that I need to prioritize joy, but that sometimes doing so means compromising on other ideals.

This is not to say that I am constantly having the same conversation over and over, but more so when I have discourse with another individual it feels as though I am just recounting the same stories told prior or reciting the same, time-tested, reasons for my own opinions and beliefs.

This has lead to a general level of frustration in my life partly, I believe, due to the fact that I don’t maintain relationships well which leads to a virtuous cycle of catching-up and thus the rehashing of the same past-life events and beliefs over and over again. Inevitably, I always allow the withering to occur; I’ll be close with someone for some time and then drift away with future social encounters relegated to “let’s do lunch sometime” or the like. On the other hand, I wonder if this is aggravating because I am easy to anger, such that maybe this rehashing is part of normal human discourse and that people who are good at speaking to others don’t feel bothered by constantly hitting on the same points like a salesman of a product: him/herself.

I should add that this lack of stimulating conservation has compounded additional factors to lead me to a low point — I feel overcome by laziness and general frustration. I’m still without an internship for the summer while I see all my friends, and acquaintances landing their dream positions, and have recently been struck by an insurmountable tidal wave of sluggishness leading me to avoid going on the bike or working more actively on my research.

As with all things in life, I am aware that this disposition is only temporary and that the best outcome will arise if I just carry on, but I am driven to make a mark of this moment. To call to attention the frustration I feel with constantly rehashing the same conversations, talking points, and ideals over-and-over again with people to the point that I simply want to stop interacting.

I want to revive the intellectually stimulating conversations of yesteryear. The large, ambiguous and philosophically objectionable questions that friends and foe alike would raise about a given topic. I want to discuss the morality and ethics of everyday life rather than just why Bitcoin is an illiquid currency, or why using deep learning makes particular sense for my research.

Despite my desire for change I’m not quite sure how to accomplish it, and that’s why I decided to write this so that I could say I tried to do something. So, for now, I’ll keep trying; let’s talk soon, and hopefully, it’ll be new.

A year ago, or maybe more, I read an article in The New Yorker about the transformation of “no” in the English language. In summary — no has gone from its true meaning — “No, I don’t want to eat that broccoli rabe.” — to instead mean yes.

The effect of that article on me was profound.

That was the first time I’d thought of language as a malleable construct. Obviously, language can be contorted, smoothed, and polished, but for a word to literally become its antithesis (yes, pun intended) was a revelation for me.

So, in thinking about this transformation of language I began to think more about patterns and usages. Too often I feel like the words just pour out of my mouth without prior thought or decision, but when I exercise a degree of forethought about my speech, the impact of the patterns and word choice are much more profound.

That’s when it hit me.

So often in everyday life we fill a space with another word that doesn’t mean what it is defined to be. It’s they.

I remember, unaware of the significance, my questioning of this construct in 7th grade in my math class. My teacher, standing at the front of the room, had noted that on my exam they might ask us to solve a problem like this. Although I’m not sure why I raised my hand and asked “Who’s they? Who is this they that will ask us a question on the exam?”. She took a minute and then responded with something along the lines of “They is me. I’m not sure why I said they but I’ll be the one writing and proctoring the exam so it’s me that will be asking you the question.”

That’s both the first occurrence I can remember, and the only time in my memory that I ever asked, and caught this hiccup, dark pattern, of the English language. Now, after that first instance I notice its use in my life more and more often. It can be in math class when the instructor talks about what might be on the next quiz or exam. It can be in my digital design class where my TA may say “they might ask you to produce something to these qualifications…” or it can be in my computer architecture class where we talk about this “they” working on some future improvements we can’t yet understand, or comprehend.

The human mind likes abstractions. In writing we use analogies, similes, hyperbole, etc. All of these are a form of rhetoric, one that serves to make truth more easily palatable and in practice, the use of rhetoric makes language more approachable, more comprehensible. To describe size in relative terms, and to use similes to make situations and objects understandable to a not-so-engaged reader… Although these things seem “abstract” as per their classification they are instead things that we can very much identify with. These abstractions form the basis of our writing, and language. Similarly, it is the appreciation of these abstractions that make us appreciate and define certain writing as masterful.

So I’ve come to realize that we use “they” as an abstraction.

Sometimes it’s because the answer would be awkward, or needlessly specific. When a math professor states that this elusive they will have input on the format of the exam, he simply means he’s going to write it how he sees fit. We all intuitively understand the context in which this statement is being made, and most likely would understand it without this vague abstraction, but we insert it to make it easier for ourselves. Rather than implicate ourselves, to open up to criticism, questioning, or another form of exposure, we delegate the unpleasant parts of language and life to an unknown and uninteresting third party.

To avoid the specifics, to make a situation more comprehensible, at the ironic cost of understanding, is the root of this conundrum.

So, just as “no” has actually come to mean “yes”, I reckon that “they” is now analogous to “I” and seemingly no-one. We use it to make ourselves more comfortable. To fill the silences in speech that only the inexperienced and informal glance over and to diffuse the otherwise questionable situations.

So there’s my rant on they. This has been something that’s plagued my mind for a while — my watching of the usage patterns of they has made me paranoid about the clarity of my own speech. If just one more person could see this use of an abstraction in the same way I do, I would be happy.

At the time, I had so much non-essential stuff that it made me physically unhappy. I felt like I couldn’t escape. I try to espouse minimalism but in this case, I felt like a hypocrite. I hang on to T-Shirts because I’m afraid that someday I may want them or I keep around some random cable or left over screws because I think it might prove useful in the future. The issue is that this default state is difficult to escape. It requires more thought to dispense of something rather than just hold onto it, and it’s for this reason that I’ve amassed too much stuff.

So I’ve decided to get rid of it all. Anything that’s not essential. Anything that I don’t use every day or thereabouts, I’m getting rid of.² I’m tired of being surrounded by clutter and constantly fearing that disposing of something now might mean trouble in the future.

Now, I just want to cut³ and keep cutting until I think I can’t anymore. Then, and only then will I have just the right amount of stuff in my life.

So goodbye to those shoes I wear once per season, and to that sweater, I thought I might wear next year if the temperature was just right.

I’m going back to basics.

That’s why I’m back in the US today, having taken 5 flights over the past 5 weeks going from Shanghai to San Francisco to Connecticut and finally to New York City.

I’m the same me I was before. I have the same goals, the same personality, and the same drive. Having now successfully completed the first part of my long term plan — working in China for the first time — I know that I’ll go back, I just don’t know when.

This past year has been the biggest for me in terms of decisions, and I felt that I’ve grown more in the past 3 months than in the last 20 years. I feel more conservative in my decisions, no longer choosing to speed while driving and preferring to save rather than spend. I’m thinking about the longterm now: having a home, a family, and a rewarding life, rather than simply whether or not I’ll survive another semester at school.

For now, I’m going to put my head back down and get to work. This year, although I’m not sure what I’ll do, I’ve cut back on my responsibilities so that I can have more personal time to both write and create software, and that excites me to great ends.

Most of you probably never realized I left, but for the few that weren’t expecting such a quick return I felt that I owed you an explanation. I realize more and more that I am becoming an adult. What that means, I’m not exactly sure, but how it feels — I do know. We’re people drifting in and out of each others’ lives, never sure of where we’ll be next. I want to maintain those relationships and roots I am so fortunate to have, while at the same time pruning those from my life who’ve shown they don’t align with my own perspective.

This is not a goodbye, or a hello. This is merely an announcement of my presence, a check-in if you will, one that indicates I’m growing as a person and trying to best figure out my path in life. Until the next time.

I’m tired. I’m really tired. Let me tell you why.

All of this, the entire journey that lead to the creation and failure to further PrintShare, started back in January when I decided to attend a medical hackathon. This story is going to be incredibly long, so let me just say from the onset, if you’re not interested, this would probably be the time to bail.

Anyway, it was the weekend of the 22^nd-24^th of January and I ventured to New Haven for this seemingly small event: CBIT-YNHHS Healthcare Hackathon. Now to be clear about how ironic all of this is, I almost didn’t go. The night before I was talking with the friends I was staying with at Yale and we almost universally agreed that this was a weird event – seemingly more of a job fair or idea-jam then the type of hackathon they know I’d usually like to attend. I was partially resolved that night to just skip the event, to just go and write some software by myself and forget what I travelled to New Haven for in the first place. This was only compounded by the fact that a literal blizzard rolled in on Saturday morning and made travel from Old Campus to the medical school nearly impossible. For reference, when I left New Haven to return home on Monday (I got stuck there!) they’d received ~24” of snow. At any rate, Evaline convinced me that even if I was going to skip it I should at least go and see what I was skipping before I left, so, slightly aggravated, I got on the bus and headed over there. This was an atypical hackathon, one that involved a lot of speeches and then for people to pitch the ideas for projects they wanted to build before they could start. I was pretty skeptical during the entire opening ceremony (it didn’t seem like the type of people or format I was comfortable with). When the time came, I pitched what I saw as the overarching problem that encompassed all the other problems: lack of middleware. I then asked for those who had the skills to come work with me on this. That’s how I met Aaron, someone still doing so much I can’t quite pin it all down or come close to understanding it. I’ll talk more about Aaron later but in general, he was the only reason I stayed. He not only had the skills to write software but also had access to the Yale New Haven Health System EMRs/EHRs, what would end up being crucial to the success of our project.

So at this point you’re probably saying to yourself, “Cooper, you said this post was about fundraising, and here you are telling me about a hackathon!” I’m about to get there, just let me keep laying the groundwork!

So this hackathon was rather peculiar, but as hackers we’re peculiar so I figured I’d just roll with it and see how it turned out. No other team there wrote or built an actual product. Everyone else was building mocks in PowerPoint, making physical models using real-world resources, or simply just coming up with pitches to sell their ideas at the closing ceremony. This hackathon, and in hindsight it’s really clear, was more of an idea-jam. They had mentors and people to help us with our pitches, to help us come up with business models, etc. If you condensed an accelerator into a two day weekend and told everyone they didn’t have to build anything real, but instead needed to solidify an idea to work on afterward that was medical related, that would probably bring you as close to recreating this event as possible. So with all that being said, we built something pretty cool.

I’m still undecided about what I want to do with the software, so because of that I’m going to give you a pretty in-depth analysis of what we can do, but I’m not quite ready to fully Open Source (OS) this because I might want to try to apply this again in the future.

To understand our solution you must first understand the problem. Let’s begin. If you’re being treated at a hospital in California and you need to seek treatment elsewhere, say at Yale New Haven (YNHHS), when you get to YNHHS they will call up your California Hospital and request your records. This will then lead to a form being faxed to YNHHS that will authorize the release of the records in a HIPAA compliant manner and when this is recieved the hospital in California will then go and print all of your Electronic Medical Records that were requested from whatever management program they might have (EPIC, Cerner, Meditech), fax them and then shred them. THIS IS LITERALLY INSANE! WHY?!

So let’s break this down. This begins with a damn phone call, a phone call! They register interest and then send a FAX. As a 19 year old, the last time I saw a fax machine was in 2001 when my father disposed of ours, but as I came to learn over the past 3 months, the government and healthcare systems (in the United States) use fax as a means of secure transfer because they have verified phone numbers and dot-codes meaning it’s very hard to spoof, and it’s low-tech enough that they don’t worry about intercept during transmission. So, you’re a hospital, you receive the phone call, fax your request, and then go and PRINT, that’s right you PRINT everything that’s in your DIGITAL patient management system. I’m getting angry just sitting at my desk. This is so backwards. So now that you’ve printed all your records out, you fax them and then shred the PRINTED paper, effectively creating waste so you can maintain your level of patient security.

Just dwell on how stupid all of this is for a moment.

Okay, we’re back. Now that you can realize how INSANE all of that is, I want to explain why the incumbents won’t change this. So let’s say you’re at that hospital in California, and you’re going to YNHHS, and let’s say you have a cardiac condition. Now when you go to YNHHS and they’re treating you, it’s assumed that they have your entire medical history and won’t glaringly omit anything. For a moment, though, assume that when the person who faxed your history made an error and she left a page of your “comprehensive history EMR” off of the transmission. Let’s just say for kicks this page was the one that detailed your cardiac condition. Now, I’m not a doctor and don’t really know anything about the medical industry (disclaimer), but let’s just say something happened, you were unconscious, and YNHHS was treating you based on this history but they don’t know you have a cardiac condition because that page is missing. This is a goddamn liability nightmare. The reason that none of this system will change is the person liable is the one that sent the transmission, not the hospital. So in the backwards and inefficient transmission system the hospital is protected! Because they’re not complaining and because the incumbents don’t want to work on this, the entire process will never change.

Alright, “Cooper, Cooper, why does any of this matter?!” I’m getting there, geez.

So, we built PrintShare! It was rather simple (or at least I thought): a little piece of Windows software with some outside dependencies that installed itself (without administrator privileges) as a Windows print driver! So now you’re probably saying “How does this solve any of the problems you just detailed above!” Well, what we do is rather simple. When you go to print the documents you were going to send, rather than print them out, fax them, and then shred them, you just send them digitally, in a fraction of the time, and never worry about it again! As I’m writing this now it sounds so, so trivial. In our envisioned flow, when you go to print, a dialog box pops up and it tells you to input either a fax, or an email. You can send the documents per normal via fax (we spoof the number and dot-code) and at this point you’re already ahead because you’re saving money on paper. If you instead choose to send them via email we have a process for verifying what are actual hospital/doctor’s emails, and then you can send the transmission to a verified recipient who will simply receive the scans on her end as a PDF thereby mitigating the time and paper on both ends.

Essentially, what we built is a secure Print-to-PDF driver that handles end-to-end transfer of Electronic Medical Records so they stay electronic. I think this is pretty simple, but apparently it’s not. So, at the hackathon, we got this WORKING. As in we wrote the software, yet we didn’t win. In fact, we didn’t even come CLOSE. Instead, we were told that we were facing major HIPAA violations (of which there are none) and it was strongly implied that while we were the only team that actually built a full product and not some .pptx, it wasn’t impressive enough.

Alright, I’m not a bitter person, so I took this in stride and I got back to work. Aaron and I decided we were going to continue to work on this because we knew that there was a re-pitch and that we could potentially land the Center for Biomedial and Interventional Technology (CBIT) and YNHHS and get ourselves some real funding and a customer. In our minds this was simple: we have a working product, so we just need a logical appeal, a great deck when we re-pitch, and it will work.

We decided to continue work on Tuesday the 26th of January after a ton of back and forth email. On the 28th of January I filed for, and subsequently received a provisional patent on the idea. So at this point Aaron and I decided we would continue development to try and get into Yale New Haven Health system, but we were at the hands of CBIT for scheduling the pitch (the dates were never clear). We filed for and were waiting to receive a provisional patent, and we decided to shop this around (logical, as we have a working product and deck from the hackathon) to some VCs.

Let’s start with the VCs.

I’m 19, I’m a freshman pursuing an undergraduate degree (that’s a topic for a whole other post though) and I like to think I’m pretty logical. I follow things through from inception to closure, and I base my arguments and decisions on what seems rational and attainable. So when I contacted some people at Oak HC/FT (I’ll admit I had some help) I was told I needed a brief 1-2 page explainer of what it was that we did and how (you can read that in the info dump below in the document entitled “Solicit Description”). On a side note, I’d recommend you read everything that’s in there if you’ve come this far. Now, I thought I was very, very clear. I laid out what I’ve explained to you, dear Reader, and I also laid out some future plans that we had. I included the deck from the original pitch (also found below) and I sent it off.

Hook. Line. Miss.

Not far enough along. Not enough of a defined scope. To broad of an idea – narrow it down, they said! We don’t understand what you’re doing (even though I thought I couldn’t be more clear, but you can decide for yourself).

Failure one. Failure to market ourselves, the problem and the product clearly. This right here, this should have been a bigger eye-opener then it was. I certainly adjusted the strategy and kept this in mind when I made subsequent pitches/decks but it was clear from this point that people either didn’t see the problem, didn’t think it was an issue, or didn’t think this was the right, or far enough along solution.

So I want to be incredibly clear at this point. I LOVED the people at Oak HC/FT. They’re actually honest and did their due diligence on us. I’m not complaining about investors, and I want to be clear: if I ever have another HealthCare or FinTech related business that gets some traction I’ll be going straight to them. It should be abundantly clear that I’m not assailing them.

Instead, I’m assailing the institutional thinking. For a lot of people, what we pitched wasn’t so much a product as it was the idea of going digital, of accomplishing everything online – something that went against established, accepted, tradition that made them uncomfortable. It wasn’t necessarily their age (though most of the people we pitched were older by nature as getting an M.D. and being respected in the medical field takes time) but the fact they’d spent so long in the institution that the institution DIDN’T look as crazy as it did to me, a complete and total outsider. It’s this combination of stagnation of thought, complacency and groupthink that create an intersection by which the insanity of the institution appears normal, and we, as the outsiders attempting to change the system are regarded as assailants and questioned accordingly.

So now for a little technical bit.

I rewrote the API for this 3 times. I started by how I would’ve before this project with my own server implementation in PHP. That initial deploy was pretty large and it took me one month, all of February, to pin down so that this would work properly (note to self, never ever use Phalcon again). Then, when I was back at Yale on March 4^th I had some free time on that Friday night and I said, “Meh, I can get better performance, let me do this in Node.js” and that implementation was maybe 1/8 of the amount of code of the original and performed better (written in one(!) night mind you). From there though, and the reason I’m writing about this, I found out about AWS Lambda (thanks to the person who I know is reading this but wouldn’t want to be named), and holy fucking shit is that service amazing. It simply could not be more amazing. In 13 lines, 13 motherfucking lines, I had a working API that was completely built on the Amazon stack. Meaning no longer was I responsible for uptime, reliability or signing, instead that was all on Amazon and that was amazing.

I bring this up for two reasons, one because Lambda is amazing and you should go use it right now, and two because this gets at a bigger issue. For the entire month of February I was spending a sizeable portion of my free time (late nights, mornings, and weekends) pinning down the specification for the API. It gets hard to keep working when you’re team is busy, or it feels like they aren’t engaged. Aaron and I were using Slack, and certainly we were talking regularly but we’re both very, very busy people, Aaron even more so than me. Now, I want to be clear, I really like Aaron (and I might want him to write me a letter at some point, especially when he gets those letters after his name 😁😁!) but it’s very hard for me, at least personally, to continue working so hard when it can feel like I’m the only one driving, when it feels like I’m the only one pushing commits and continuing to drive development.

In the future, if Aaron has more time, and I’m available, I would love to work on another project with him because we think similarly, and yet we approach problems in different ways and it’s for this reason that I think we would write some truly amazing software together. That said, it was just so very hard to continuing developing PrintShare at pace when it felt to me at times like I was the only one that was pushing as hard to keep moving forward.

So this all brings me to this week. I’d been working on the software until the middle of March, and then in my free time began putting together the deck for the CBIT repitch, the one in which we’d hopefully get monetary backing and assistance from CBIT that would put us in YNHHS with real users and get us on a trajectory to success.

We aced the pitch. Not.

Failure two. So at 4:45PM on Tuesday the 29^th of March, 2016, after having made the deck and rehearsed my pitch many times over the 2 weeks prior to the event, I let it all go and gave it my best. I thought I delivered the best possible pitch, covering all bases in the 6 minutes I was given and then awaited my Q&A. The HIPAA question. I was not surprised, CBIT was still hung up on how this was compliant, and I tried to make it clear that we weren’t doing anything differently than they currently were, just changing the physical state & process for doing so. Then the IP question asking about how dependent we were on getting the patent to proceed. Time ended.

I felt like I had gotten it, people laughed (this didn’t happen in response to any other pitch) and they liked the deck! But when the results came back we not only didn’t win, but had the same critical feedback that we got initially, evaluators believing we didn’t understand the market, or the problem. I’m a believer in free information so you can also find those linked at the bottom.

This hurt, it really hurt. I don’t know how else to say it. We were the only people there with a finished, fully functioning product. The only people for whom CBIT could see immediate success and not waste years and millions of dollars going through regulatory and IP landscapes to maybe get to market. Yet, despite seeming so logical, and such a good idea it didn’t appear that way to them.

I felt done. I feel done.

Now before I get into the negatives I want to mention that I’m going to Cigna this summer to work with SE&I, and I’m incredibly thrilled about that. The only reason I have this opportunity afforded to me is because I embarked on this journey and I met the right people at the right time, and so, if nothing else, if not for meeting Aaron, learning to write better software and trying and failing at my first real software startup, then at the least I got an amazing opportunity to work with Cigna out of this.

On to the negatives.

First, let me say that I’m sorry if this comes off as being conceited, dishonest or in poor taste, but it’s how I feel and I like to be honest on my own site. I feel tired because I’m done with being the best and not winning. I’m tired of working beyond my limit, of pushing the boundaries, or really and truly trying to be a league above everyone else and yet still losing out to the people who appear to be below me. I’m tired of working on projects that should be winners, but end up as losers. I’m tired of having my success be tethered to the perceptions of the rest of the world, and not to my own ability. I’m tired of losing.

Talking about failure publicly is really important to me. When I wrote about why I was leaving Facebook one of the main factors for me was that people only post the good there, never the bad. For instance people only post when they’re accepted into their reach colleges to celebrate, never when they get rejected and it’s this seemingly jilted dichotomy that bothers me. For every success you tout there have to be an equal number, if not more, of absolutely horrific failures that occurred, and yet we never share them. Instead, if we do decide to talk about failure, we fetisihize it, “Fail quick, fail fast” or “I like failing because it helps me to figure out what doesn’t work more quickly.” No, really? What we never do though is be honest. We, as a society, never just talk about how things make us feel. How absolutely and positively horrible it feels to lose, how worthless it makes you feel to be the one that didn’t get picked or see all of your immense effort expended for naught. I’m done with this.

The reason I’m posting here is because I care about honesty and I don’t care how it makes me look. I don’t care if you think I’m selfish, conceited or just in general a bad person. At the least I’ll know that I’m a person, and not trying to portray myself as anything beyond that. I fail and I’m honest. I feel horrible and I want to tell you about it. It doesn’t benefit me to hide this from you. Instead, by sharing my failures openly, it makes me a better person because I have nothing to hide or fear from the world.

I’m incredibly proud to be a member of the extended Yale community, fortunate for the opportunities that are constantly afforded to me, and for the fact that my I’m privileged enough to even have the focus of this entire post be a problem in my life. So I want you to know that while I’m tired, I still recognize how lucky, how fortunate, how exceedingly rare a position I’m in, and for that I can be appreciative. For now though, I need a break. I need some time to figure out more personally why I failed and how I can come back at a different problem and really solve it.

I’m tired. I’m really tired, but if you have a project you want to work on with me, let me know, because I’m hungrier than ever to win and I’m ready to do whatever it takes to get it.

Click this to download all the files I’ve mentioned. View/download individual files below.

• CBIT Presentation (PDF)
• CBIT Presentation (Keynote)
• CBIT Judging Feedback (PDF)
• Hackathon Presentation (PDF)
• Venture Capital Solicit Description (PDF)

This was a rough year for me, in many ways. I’ve been through a lot and my opinions on both software & productivity have changed substantially.

I used to think that I owned devices to enjoy them. I wanted the latest and the greatest just so I could have it. Work was a secondary concern. Now, that is not so much the case for me. More than anything, I now prioritize above all else my ability to work efficiently. When I sit down at my computer, it’s not about having the most pleasureable experience or enjoying myself but about how I can most swiftly conquer my inbox, produce a deliverable, communicate with others, etc.

Working with this mindset has lead me to re-evaluate my goals. When I started my free software project I wanted to do it so that I could say I’d done it and feel good about myself. Unfortunately, as I became more deeply involved I felt both my productivity and ability slipping. This was not, and is not the path that I want to go down.

That’s why today, Monday, May 30^th, I’m announcing that I failed to meet my goal of using 100% free software by May 5^th 2016, and ironically am now using more paid software than I when I began.

I leave one recommendation: don’t pursue goals to simply accomplish them; rather, pursue those that a) you deeply believe in and b) align well with your outlook and needs. With this in mind, don’t try to force yourself to follow a philosophy that sounds perfect in theory but doesn’t personally work for you. Do what is right for yourself and your work.

I still fully support and will continue to work on open source, but the best way for me to do so is by not using 100% free software.

For one reason or another (I can’t quite pin it down), I have very low self-confidence. I’m not quite sure why, I just know that I take compliments rather poorly and am very rarely proud or exuberant about myself or my accomplishments. It might be because I was told regularly I was too selfish when I was young, or because I was always part of good teams, but never the star player or the one responsible for the team’s success — I’ve always just been there.

Recently though, I’ve found myself in this pitfall: riding waves. Right now you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Cooper, what in the world do you mean by riding waves?” And I’d respond to you, well dear reader, please sit back because I’m about to tell you!

There’s nothing better than being successful. It fills me with pride when I write code that runs, when I have a project that actually accomplishes the goal I initially set out to achieve, or in this case when I can put words on paper that convey my intended meaning. Now, imagine when you do this so well that you get an accolade and your project not only succeeds but also wins an award at a hackathon, or becomes super popular and receives hella stars on GitHub. In short, you might think this is good, but here lies the issue: for someone like myself who has little self-pride, I’ll wind up in the situation where I define my own self value by that of my projects, rather than myself.

This becomes cyclical, and it’s unhealthy. By riding the waves I mean that you can be so fortunate as to feel amazing for a week, maybe two while something is trending. Feel good for a couple days when you break your personal record, or you’re riding high on some success, but in due time that wave crests, the high comes to an end and you find yourself in a lull without anything to prop up your self pride. In my case, I’ll often feel this way after a hackathon (for a week or maybe two after I feel amazing, simply thinking to myself, “I’m amazing….I built that thing” and to the person who might offend or hurt me in that week or two I’ll simply think to myself “pff, they don’t know who I am or what I’m capable of, I’m amazing”).

The issue with this approach though is what happens when the wave dissipates, when your entire self-confidence, pride, image, etc. is built on ephemeral accomplishments and desires. This is my dilemma, it’s one that I haven’t figured out yet, one that I know hints at a significantly deeper issue in my life, and one that will take me years and years to root out. What I have come to find though is that eliminating venues for gloating or viewing of accomplishments (i.e. Facebook) make it easier to avoid getting into this cycle. That said, even not being on Facebook, I still find myself subconsciously riding waves and it’s very, very hard to stop.

So, if you get anything out of this writing at all, it’s that if you feel like you’re ever riding a wave, realize it’s momentary and try not to define yourself based on past or prior successes. Today you are a champion, tomorrow you are nothing.

Now I just need to figure out what I’ll do tomorrow.

I’ve been on Facebook for a long time: since the middle of 2007 when accounts were first opened to the public (I was 10 years old) and I’ve seen it go through many tides. I’ve seen my fair share of redesigns, feature introductions and sunsets, as well as the rotation in crops of friends. The only thing that remains from those earliest years, save few of the friends I have from then, are the very young pictures of me. For a while, I’ve taken a contrarian approach to Facebook. I’ve trimmed my friends every year or so trying to avoid the fake friends – the ones whose photos and posts you like, or you like solely for avoiding the fear of missing out but who you never interact with meaningfully. I ruthlessly unfollowed and unfriended family and I constantly tried to limit the number of groups I was a part of. Yet throughout all of this I felt my return on investment was very low. I would spend ~5-10 minutes per day perusing my feed only to leave feeling worse than before. I’d feel bad only seeing friends achievements or pictures when I had none of my own to post. To be clear, it’s not that I feel like my life is devoid of those things, it’s more so just that I seldom post in the first place (that’s a matter for another post though).

In the past months I’ve felt it become more toxic.

I’ve had people friend me after meeting once only to never interact with them again. I’ve been added to groups and constantly notified of events which I feel like I should follow, but I really don’t care for. The last straw for me was realizing today that I wanted to do something so that I could get the likes and the comments on Facebook. Having the realization that the fuel for my actions was something negative, and that I purely wanted to do something for public attention was just too much for me.

It feels like everyone I’m friends with on Facebook is fake, even the people I talk to daily. We all, myself included, try to portray ourselves in the best light possible. We post only the photos that make us look good, only the events that commemorate our successes (never our failures) and it’s all to self aggrandize, to relish in that sweet sweet karma of people who we don’t really care for or need to be connected to that degree with. I know this whole “perception of others on Facebook” bit has been beaten to death already, so I’ll stop the train of my issues here, but just know I’ve had more than enough.

The one thing I felt like I got meaningful use out of was Messenger. There is an issue though – it’s like Facebook is selling free crack covered candy, it’s so good and oh-so addicting. Messenger puts all of the people you need to talk to in one place, it gives you a constant and easy communication medium. Pile on top the gif integration, the stickers, the emoji and new chat customization and it seems nearly perfect save two things: firstly, I have to sell myself to get access to it and secondly it absolutely obliterates my phone battery.

Now, I realize that this indefinite Facebook hiatus will be hard. What I’m most nervous about: still being an active member in clubs and hackathons when the main medium for meeting and organization is via Facebook. I’m also terribly nervous that this will severely impact how easily I am able to chat with people, though I hold some hope that this will help to show me who I am truly close with for I am confident that those people will seek me out.

On balance, I believe that leaving Facebook will be good for me. In the 9 years I’ve been on the platform I’ve gotten very, very little positive output from the system. I know that leaving Facebook will not cure my underlying tendencies to seek outside validation, and I know that in the short term abandoning the platform will be a disaster chat wise (simply nothing compares, but for right now I am going to try Telegram with those who will be willing). It’s my hope though that by removing the enabling medium for poor behavior I can start to become a more positive and engaging person. I want to remove the cruft that I feel has been weighing me down for too long. Facebook has not brought my anywhere close to the hypothesis brought forth by Evaline, and I don’t think it will.

That’s not nearly everything, but in a nutshell it’s why I’m taking an indefinite and most likely permanent break from Facebook.