2020 Reflections

A lot of things changed slowly throughout the year. For all practical purposes, the year started on March 13th when I flew home from NYC as the pandemic worsened. The following months brought on slow gradual changes and personal developments, and reflecting on these developments and changes will help make the implicit more explicit, crystalizing the learnings from the year.

I’m Getting Older

I’m getting older. And it’s…better than expected? I think our culture’s aesthetic focus and adoration of spontaneity romanticize youth in a way that sets every mid-twenty something up for distress about aging at some point (or multiple points) throughout their early adulthood. I looked at myself at 25 and felt critically underdeveloped. Some things that I thought about as I entered my 25th year: I haven’t really sniffed a serious relationship since college, my most frequently attended to hobby was partying, and I still didn’t really know how to save money. And with each year I’m becoming further removed from the physique that I had in college, a thought that surfaces itself as a sense of decay (lol peaked in college). With all that said, one of the things quarantining forced me to do, besides be sad and upset, was find hobbies that I found fulfilling. I read through >20 books, I biked 2500 miles between April and December, began to run a bit more frequently, and even picked up a music a bit more. The inwards focus helped me find an identity, and with each year comes experiences, reactions, and choices that help change and reinforce that identity. I remember that leaving HS and to some degree throughout college, I always wanted a job and life that was as far from routine as possible. Routine was boring and a concession that you’ve ceded ur livelihood to the man. This year was the fist year I think I fully embraced routine. Each day that I held myself accountable and stuck to the routine I set out to follow, I got a little bit of joy and accomplishment. The tiniest bit. These things were as small as making coffee at home instead of going out, not drinking for the day, or making sure I did the workout I said I would. I found myself ending the day happy. And while the days that ended in drunken stupor were also happy ones, these days feel happy and sustainable, filled with momentum and development. So, as I get older, I’m kind of really excited to continue developing and building momentum for myself.

On Deriving Meaning from my Career

Work is becoming an increasingly important part of my life. For years I was strongly avoided adopting a careerist focus in my life. My job was my job and it was nice, but I abhorred defining myself by it. To be clear here, I’m not passing judgment on people who approach their job this way – I just felt that the focus and obsession on career that I saw in San Francisco was not what I wanted for myself. I don’t think i’ve left this hill, but I’m definitely no longer yelling from the top of it. A couple of things contributed to this transformation. The first is that I found that the impact I care about isn’t separate from my skill set. I saw how being professional technologist can drive impact outside of lucrative enterprise tech. Some example skills might include optimizing user flows for donation/non-profit sites or leveraging data analysis/visualization toolboxes for open city data – there are quite a few skills that we develop working in private tech that translate to public tech (see here for Cyd Harrell’s Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide). If one has the opportunity to make their career their life’s defining contribution, it begins to make sense why people are so obsessed about it. And well, this year, I began to think more critically about the skills, experiences, and knowledge I want to have in a year or two. Graduation still feels like yesterday, and the mindset of “I’ll do whatever what’s needed of me, not necessarily what’s best for me” that I started my professional career with has reached the end of the road. At this point, the energy and will power needed to accomplish meaningful impact requires a dedication that comes more intrinsically than extrinsically, and for that, I realized that I needed to commit myself to things that are best for me. And so, as you naturally select into more fulfilling work, your personal identity and work identity align and boom, your promotion was your biggest sense of accomplishment all year.

Mike Tyson

Mike Tyson changed my life? If not “changed”, then significantly influenced. What a wild thing to take away from 2020. For some background, in November 29, 2020, Tyson fought Roy Woods Jr. I don’t spend any time at all watching fighting really, but I do spend a shit load of time on twitter, and this video from a reporter came across the TL. I didn’t think it was gonna be much until he made something explicit that had surfaced itself implicitly and infrequently. Among the gems in this video:

When asked about whether he was scared of failure when coming back to fight from such a long time off of fighting “I think…nothing’s impossible to someone who tries, so I never think about failure [when I try]”
When it was suggested that he doesn’t let the pressure get to him, he responds “I need the pressure, without the pressure there’s no me…anything I’m afraid to do, I do it”. He follows, “That’s just how I live my life. I live to be humbled”
The reporter suggests a summary: that one should do what one’s afraid of for more success. Tyson picks at this framing though, and emphasizes that material success “is not an inside job”. He clarifies that this about you, the individual. “the more you’re comfortable with you, the more you’ll be comfortable with death. The more you’re comfortable with death, the more you’ll be at peace with yourself”.

While I haven’t had any qualms with death, or thought about it in any significant capacity, I definitely have found that the more afraid I am of doing something, the more at peace I am with myself after applying myself and trying. “Live to be humbled” feels like a great mantra moving forward too. Towards the year, this video came in relevance. An internal role at work opened up - one that scared me in a lot of the right ways. What hit home though was that I should try - I should understand the fear as legitimate, but work to eradicated it. So I prepared for the role, interviewed as best as could, and the sleep I had the night after they were done was a deep one.

This year was really hard

This year was really hard. I almost skipped this part. Maybe I’ve normalized it or blocked it out. A lot of nights ended about what might happen to my family and friends as a result of the numerous number of shitshows that happened this year. Things are still bleak as fuck, but I guess that’s the new normal. I read somewhere that happiness is only relative to the previous situation. That feels a bit reductive, but it definitely hit home when I came back from my two month long joy-filled road trip and had to reinstall my life of routine in the Houston suburbs. Boy was I sad as fuck. Things are normal now though. I have a close circle IRL and a close circle on the interwebs. I took COVID risks that I was comfortable with and tried to make sure that any impact afterwards would be minimized. I flirted with “the past life”. I think these ventures are more to satisfy a curiosity or push off long standing boredom. The reality has become that the COVID lifestyle is a permanent one until further notice, and the focus is to make each day/week/month better than the one before. It feels like the best way to be happy.