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http://icedtrees.blogspot.com/2015/11/retrospective.html

 another five years pass, and yet again i find myself transforming into someone i barely recognise.

i'm 25 now. given the average lifespan, i'm about 30% of the way through my life. pretty good progress, if you ask me.

 ---

 

"I suppose one thing I'm wondering is if my personality will improve at all over the next 5 years. What lessons will there to be learned?"

you've always been a problem-solver - a battering ram, if you like. you don't give up until you've figured out the right answer. it's worked for every video game you've ever played - sink enough time and energy into it, rinse and repeat, and you'll eventually find the right answer. it works for puzzles. it works for rubik's cubes. if you keep trying you'll eventually succeed.

you'll realise very quickly that you're in fact not invincible, and not every problem is something you can solve. you'll spend a lot of time stressing over how your relationship isn't perfect. you won't have the faintest idea how to deal with conflict - you'll try to suppress your needs to try to be perfect for someone else, and you'll be surprised when that goes to shit.

you'll learn there's no right answer this time. you can't just solve your relationship.

later you'll learn that you're simply not good at dealing with other people when they're mad at you. you're good at achieving things yourself, but not at supporting others. you need a lot of validation from others, your relationship is way too unstable to give you what you need, and as a result you're in no position to help others with their own problems.

 

 

you're accustomed to achievement, and you're surprised when you don't succeed at work. you're surprised when people don't have the same priorities as you. one guy's a first-time manager and doing his best but clearly isn't prepared for management. one guy just wants to play politics so he can get promoted into management. one guy clearly doesn't give a shit about work at all and mainly seems to prioritise going to burning man each year.

you're too idealistic. you want to work at a place where everyone just wants to make a good product together, where everyone's on the same team - and it's impossible at this size of company where a ton of people just care about themselves and their own careers. sometimes you think everyone trying to move into management is a scumbag.

you hate telling people what you need and want because you want people to like you. you put your head down and try to do good work for your team, which is great for the company i guess but not so good for you. you fail to get promoted from L2 to L3 and you're salty because you feel like you're somehow more important than the other people on your team. work is a people game moreso than a technical one, there isn't a clear goal or direction, and you have to figure out what winning means. of course you suck at it.

people aren't a problem you can just throw yourself at and expect to solve.

 

after your break-up, you'll extricate yourself from a relationship that consumed all your energy and time and you'll be forced back into society. there's a guy you cook with who will tell you that you should express your preferences more and that you should do boba for first dates so you can leave quickly if needed. he'll tell you that life isn't necessarily about achievements, it's about friends. he'll tell you your relationship was kinda fucked and that you're normal. makes you feel a lot better, doesn't it?

with his help you'll learn that you actually have a lot of control with your interactions with people. your friends aren't just good friends or bad friends - they're much more complex than that, and you can't just write people off because of one bad experience with them. slowly you'll figure out that trying to be as accommodating as possible to everyone is basically beating yourself up for no reason.

on the flip side, you'll realise that sometimes you have to write people off - some relationships with other people just aren't worth keeping around.

for a long time he will seem invincibly confident - like his whole life is under control and the right thing to do is always obvious. in time you'll realise he's a human too - a human with some really compelling ideas at the right time in your life.

you'll try to stop stressing over whether other people are having a good time or not, and you'll get 30% of the way there. but you've been watching people all your life desperate for validation, and you're not going to just quit that habit cold turkey.

 

going on dates with new people is fun at first, and it's exciting to meet new people. it's validating to know that some girls are interested in you, and each new match is a dopamine shot that it's easy to get addicted to. making deeper connections with essential strangers is hard, though, and really you have no clue what you're doing.

when on the verge of giving up on dating apps, you'll meet one last girl. on the first date she seems like a normal person. she can hold a conversation and she pays for drinks. not bad at all. she's genuinely interested in you, and unlike the other people you met online, she has none of the reserved caution of a stranger.

as you start to meet her friends, slowly she starts to shine. you can tell she really loves the people around her, and she makes them feel included and wanted. being around her makes you feel warm like the sun and people really like that. you worry a bit that she's putting other people's needs above her own.

every day, she sees you as someone more incredible than you would ever see yourself, and eventually you start to internalise some of that. eventually you start to feel like a whole person by yourself, not just half of a relationship.

 

 

you're naturally over-optimistic. you think you can do anything if you work hard enough at it, but the reality is that you don't have the motivation to put in the level of hard work every day. every time it's someone's birthday you come up with an extravagant idea that you don't have the abilities to follow through on. every competition you're aiming for the #1 spot you don't really deserve and you're never able to practice hard enough to justify your goals.

you come last in a lot of latte art competitions, you try making a juggling video but the advanced tricks are all too hard, and you try winning money playing online poker but the players are too good so you give up and settle for playing in vegas instead.

it's not so bad though - usually you get 30% of the way to your goal. maybe that's good enough?

you're always looking upwards, and i think that's a good thing. don't you dare look down

 

you'll start a corporate starcraft team. for several weeks, it will sink all your time and energy - you plan practice sessions for the team, you buy individual coaching, something you've never even considered. nowadays you throw yourself more intelligently into problems and try to think of things like how to run good team practice sessions. you even hired daniel to analyse your team's replays. thanks daniel. you don't tilt hard after games like you used to.

it'll probably be the last time you'll ever invest time into playing starcraft - games have always been about the people, and being able to feel validated, and i really think your fire died long ago when you finally hit grandmaster.

you'll let down your team once more. it's the final week and it's the tiebreaker match to decide who will make playoffs. you lose the critical ace match to the grandmaster player from the bloomberg team because you got supply blocked at 92/92, you thought you were playing on acid plant instead of blackpink, and you didn't listen to PiG when he told you that you have to push slower against zergs that cut drones on 50.

just like you lost that chess game in high school by rushing your move and playing Qc4+ up a knight for 2 pawns in a king's gambit because the other guy told you he was in a hurry to go - not realising black defends trivially with d4 and now you're just down 2 central pawns. just like you were 1 problem short in the icpc sub-regional to make world finals and you didn't realise it's sufficiently performant to simply brute-force all the 3-tuples of provided combinations.

your girlfriend tells you you're too hard on yourself, but you're not really listening because you're too busy remembering every failure and wondering what you could have done differently to win.

you always let your team down one step too short.

 

 

"Finally, reading your writing was inspiring, and makes me want to write more. I hope you do too! You've reminded me that writing can be a tool for connection, just as much as it can be for communication."

you'll meet someone who tells you that she dreams of writing after quitting her tech job. you remember that you used to write some shitty blog posts that were kind of fun to send to your friends. you scavenge some fragments of motivation together one more time and click "new post".

---

to my future self:

five years is a long time.

there's a reddit post i think back to every once in awhile. here it is. don't know if it's even a real story or not. the comments section is really incredible - it's full of people making the same mistake this guy did. i wonder what i will feel when i wake up to be 46 years old, whether i will regret like he did.

i'm scared to regret my life, and every once in awhile it drives me to get off my bed/phone and clean up my house for some artificial feeling of productivity.

as i grow older, the less invincible i feel. at some point five years ago, i thought i was perfect and i could take on anything. tell me, where did all the confidence go? how can i grow into someone i can be proud of in the end? are you proud of your last five years?

writing these posts gives me some small solace - five years is enough time to see that i'm making some non-trivial progress and convinces me that i'm going somewhere with my life. 

nowadays i'm becoming viscerally aware of my flaws - sometimes i feel merely a mindless slave under my emotions. i take my feelings out on other people, i can lose all my productive motivation in ten seconds, and i get unreasonably tilted when people disagree with me. that awareness tempers me and i slowly get better at dealing with my own feelings.

i feel like i was barely able to scrape together the motivation and energy to write this blog post - where are you gonna get your motivation and energy from? is there going to be a new post in 5 years, or is this post going to be the last of its kind, a mere remnant of the better times in your life?

honestly, just start writing and don't stop writing. pretend it's nanowrimo. doesn't matter how shitty your ideas are as long as you get them down somehow.

sometimes i feel like the infinite sky i once had is collapsing down into a claustrophobic ceiling. once upon a time, i had all the potential in the world, an endless array of possibilities. now i'm planning out what i should do with my life months, years down the line. there's a grey stone path in front of me and it's all i know how to follow. 

nowadays i feel much less of a raw bundle of passion and drive and more of a refined tool. i'm good at some things and bad at other things, and i'm starting to figure out what those things are.

at some point in my life i dreamed of becoming a teacher. the best teacher in the world, i thought. "if i just throw myself into improving at teaching, i can out-teach anyone else!" i thought, arrogantly. "look how poorly these ideas are being taught!". i've lost a lot of that arrogance because it's kinda shitty to be so condescending. i think a lot of it came from a place of wanting to prove myself to other people.

once i sent this lecturer a manifesto about how he could improve his lectures (it's in a draft post "lecture discussion 2" on that blog). He had this to say:

"Thanks for all the detailed feedback. I actually attempt everything you suggest, but as you see, it's not easy to keep it together, old habits die hard as they say."

what an incredible humble person. i dunno if i could ever take feedback so well.

i started a teaching blog a long time ago - do you remember it? i'm rereading it now and i think it's written in kind of a stupid self-centered way. back then i had so many ideas and so many dreams. i wanted to read academic papers in my spare time, can you believe that? i hope this is a dream you won't forget about. even if you haven't written a single post in that blog, i want you to at least remember this part of yourself. go start that tutoring company! fuck money. go live a colourful life, one where you can step outside and love the feeling of being in the world.

you promised yourself you would take on some barista shifts at a coffee shop once you get your green card. you'd better keep to that promise.

go buy your parents that first class flight and hotel.

finally, you'd better be at least diamond in league of legends. i'm gold 4 atm and it sucks being bad. play some warwick for me, for the good old times.

wishing you all the best,

@icedtrees