In about twenty days I turn 21, which apparently means I will be technicallly allowed to legally drink, get married, and sort of be responsible for myself. I’m still not entirely sure why that number suddenly means adulthood, sometimes I(or we) tend to think of life like moving from one milestone to the next but i really dont think so that is the correct way of looking at things because “nothing changes when nothing changes”.
Windows Restore Point
This(blog?) feels a bit like a Windows restore point (a save point you can go back to if something breaks), something you create before installing some sussy software, messing with the BIOS, or doing something risky, just so you can revert back if things go wrong. Not that I’m planning on doing anything particularly risky, but it feels like things around me are slowly shifting , like everything around is slowly changing.
“Days go slow and months go fast.”
It sounds a bit retarded at first, but I’m starting to see what it actually means. Every day feels unending and grueling for the most part, but somehow weeks fly past, months fly past, and even years do. Not too long ago we were on the college basketball court playing football all day, and now it’s internships, finishing courses, and the LeetCode grind (well, not me :) anyway). Time really does fly.
Quitting??
Over the past month or so, I feel like I’ve quietly quit a lot of things.
I am genuinely done doing hackathons. After losing three in a row(still feel should have won all 3 of them) I honestly had no idea how to get better at them. The strange thing about hackathons is that you can build whatever you want, but in the end it depends on whether the judge likes it or not. You could make something genuinely good, but if it doesn’t land the way they expect, it doesn’t really matter. Being impressive and looking impressive are two very different things. With things like football or most sports, effort and outcome are mostly correlated. If you train more and play better, you usually see the results. Here it feels a bit different. Luck seems to play a much bigger role.
I also quit LeetCode(didnt really start it all that much). It absolutely sucks for me…I hate doing it, every time I open a problem I just hate myself. Maybe I just need to spend more time being bad at it to eventually get good at it.
Running slowed down too. In January I ran nearly 115 kilometers in a month, which felt like a monstrous amount at the time. Now it’s maybe one or two runs a week. My marathon got cancelled as well, which kind of killed the momentum. I wouldn’t exactly call that quitting, but it definitely changed the pace.
And when you stop doing the things you have to (or are supposed to), everything just feels a bit safer. You’re not constantly pushing yourself or trying something difficult all the time. You can just chill and watch a sitcom, or play something. Life just becomes easier for a bit. But it also makes me wonder… how is so easy to just stop trying?
Conclusion
Maybe it’s one of those moments in life, you know? Like those gay ass influencer posts with the motivational “success graphs,” where the line keeps going through multiple downhills and stagnant phases before it eventually goes all uphill (ah yes, an insane amount of copium). Or maybe it only gets worse, and the downhill is just easier to run anyway. Either way, I do have a good feeling (my balls are tingling) that good things are coming my way. Ciao.