"i wish I didn't have drive"

"i wish I didn't have drive"

this is something i oftentimes would tell myself in my head

"i wish i could wake up go to work go home hang out with friends and thats it"

I didn't actually mean it when saying it, but I think over time I started to.

there's 2 main assumptions in that statement

• work isn't fullfilling
• you will always be the person you are today 5 years from now

for me thats just not the case. every job I have been at I have always loved doing what I do. that is obviously a blessing, not everyone can say that

its 2025. in 2020 I was:

• in my freshman dorm room with a close childhood friend from rapping for fun
• barely knew how to code at a proficient level
• barely worked out
• didn't have any good friends outside of said friend

my interests were completely different and i felt bad for it. I also didn't really have a purpose. to be fair, at 19 years old I don't expect anyone to.

the difference between now and then is that:

• i now realize its completely normal to want to try new things
• i was insecure about seeming different than everyone else I interacted with
• at my root, i was unconfident in myself
• i now tend to do something based on my intuition on the subject, not rely on someone else's
• i have friends who i can text whenever I want, i didn't then
• i am not around people who try to bring me down or feel like I am less than them, in fact very much so the opposite

in saying this,

one thing i realized recently is that I get very obsessive over certain things and as a result have the ability to pick things up pretty quickly, this mostly boils down to getting very deep vertically in a subject, then slowly horizontally expanding

for an example - lets take chess.

the way I learned how to play chess was through 2 things

• getting wrecked by people better than me
• playing puzzles

the latter is just finding a way to do a check mate in n turns. i just played this until i got decent

learning a codebase is very similar

you get very deep in a specific part of the codebase (ex: an API endpoint, cron job, etc), then slowly expand to other stuff. a lot of times there will be an initial point where your like "wtf am i doing"

rapping is also very similar

when i started freestyling in my car in high school 95% of the stuff I said revolved around 3 or 4 different rhyme schemes. once i was really comfortable with those rhyme schemes I kept horizontally expanding. eventually I was able to horizontally expand very easily

I tend to eventually drop off and stop doing xyz thing and switch to something else at a certain point, i think this is healthy, I think I need to learn to be more ok with this actually. my living in different city phase is a example of this. Its also pretty clear to me that there are downsides to this approach, I am still figuring out a good middle ground.

taking a look back at the last 6 months - i think its pretty clear to me that:

• i want to settle down in one city
• i need to find a social hobby (maybe 2)
• i need to figure out how to balance out the obsession in a healthy way (maybe i don't need to actually) - to prevent burnout

things im not worried about

• fitness
  • pretty confident that as long as im at this job it will be pretty easy to be doing this
• my job
  • i need to work very hard, but I get the sense ill like it
• dating
  • i will be using apps, but i'd rather not have my self esteem revolving around how many likes i get etc, have a sense that if I do 2 above it will help a lot in that department

to end this

its 2030. in 2025 I :

• was just moving into a new city and starting a job
• just got out of trying to run a business
• had a good group of friends that I didn't live in the same city with but talked to a lot

in 2030:

• i have financial stability
  • i.e, I can afford to fuck off for some extended period of time
  • if I had to put a number to this, $1m at minimum, it honestly can be way lower than that though
• ive lived in a city for 5 years. at this point I really want to do that, if not the city i am currently in, then some other city
• i have a very fulfilling social life, I am around those I love all of the time, whether that is friends or family
• i invest more in my faith in god