Preface
The idea of writing a weekly review had been on my mind since before my birthday. I was initially drawn to the open-source weekly reviews by Xuanwo. On one hand, I aspired to reach a state where I could produce and contribute something every week. On the other hand, I was intrigued by the concept of observing and measuring my life, work, and learning on a weekly scale.
Abandoning thought is always the easiest and most comforting thing to do. Life is already filled with countless trivial matters, noise, and various “high-priority” tasks. Even when we manage to carve out a complete block of time, we seem to choose to space out and let our minds wander. This is probably the inertia of life. Even as the beginning of this series, the novelty and still-warm flag couldn’t resist the force of inertia, and I only started writing two days after the scheduled date.
Although this is positioned as a weekly review, I still want to adopt the form of a complete article covering specific themes, rather than just a pile of bullet points. Perhaps at this stage of life, I will focus more on reflections on emotions and life. In later stages, I might pay more attention to lifestyle and observations on personal development. It may not be necessary for every article to stand at a certain height to point out a direction for myself or provide slogan-like encouragement. I prefer to view it as a form of dialogue.
In this issue, let’s talk about emotions, sense of security, and living earnestly.
Starting Life from Zero
Although May couldn’t be called muddled, it was far from positive. I was avoiding facing various changes in life with all sorts of excuses. From a painful night, I decided to make some adjustments to my living environment and habits, starting from my birthday, to begin living earnestly again as an individual.
In fact, this short phrase has multiple meanings for me: “again”, “as an individual”, “earnestly”, and “living”.
It seems that it has been a very long time since I managed my own life from a personal perspective, so long that I have lost this “skill” or “habit”. In the six or seven years of freely disposable time since college, I seemed to be a person inclined to gain “attention” from what I was doing, and with a relatively mild personality, I didn’t lack social interactions. So for a very long time, I only needed to focus on myself, without casting too much attention on the collection of elements we call “life” that radiate from my life as the axis.
With the transition from student life to the workplace, when free time and disposable attention were invaded by work and the interactions and socializing that naturally come with this age, I found it harder to find the part that belonged to me.
Being swept along by life seems to be a passive skill cultivated with age. Most people would praise the “moving forward” part, as if being able to maintain the motivation to move forward at this stage is already commendable. But this is also a thinking trap, a comfort zone composed of satisfaction. Perhaps what we need to overcome is not the squeezed time and energy, but how we fight against anxiety in this state to maintain our original intentions.
Perhaps it’s human nature, even without deliberately comparing ourselves with those around us, we’re always worried or afraid of a feeling I call “Left Behind”. In learning, I always tend to continuously acquire new information or understand new technologies, always afraid of the opportunity cost brought by the shift of my focus. There’s an abbreviation in the investment circle that fits this point well, “FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)”. We’re always afraid of being the one who misses opportunities, even at the cost of not screening. Fortunately, I have a good degree of freedom to avoid meaningless competition at work. After completing work responsibilities, I will invest more time and energy into some of my own affairs.
I’m actually a person who doesn’t rely much on social interactions, pouring my limited willingness to externalize emotions into those closest to me. But whether it’s due to being in a new environment or reaching a certain age, I now seem to slowly start worrying about whether I’m too unique to have opportunities to make new friends, and I’m afraid of being the one who can’t join in conversations in the colleague circle. Although it’s not utilitarian, I’ve started to face others with a more positive and polished attitude.
Moving forward without direction and original intention may alleviate one’s anxiety, but it may bring long-term stagnation or even deviation from the track. The boundary of this part is difficult to grasp, and I seem to have always been not very good at dealing with these things. But to regain control of one’s life, one needs to constantly fight against these, and human nature always tends to choose the easy way. So, the biggest enemy is still oneself.
“Illusion” and “Reality” in Relationships
In fact, it’s still difficult to avoid pain and loss when talking about relationships now, but it’s gradually time to look back. I saw this sentence before:
In the previous discussion about relationships, “Confessions at 25: A Bouquet-like Love”, I mentioned:
Sometimes, only by desperately changing and adapting can we barely maintain the status quo in life.
Actually, thinking about it later, this is also a luxurious and impossible thing to maintain. The decline of feelings is like the concept of “people getting old” - although it’s common sense, it can only be truly understood when personally experienced. It’s like many things happening in life, the drain in the bathroom is clogged, and a little water overflows every time after taking a shower. Maybe it’s been like this for a week, maybe longer. Because it doesn’t overflow too much to affect the room, just slightly wets the feet and recedes soon, so it hasn’t been paid much attention to, and hasn’t been fixed; or every time I close the door, I’m still very careful to gently close it and look back, afraid that the cat will run out, and it took a while to realize that I’ve been away from this home for a long time, it’s just a habit. Maybe many things are like this, when staring at a predetermined result, suddenly realizing that it has been happening all along, just that I didn’t notice.
Perhaps what I’m increasingly realizing about relationships is that memory is not so solid, habits and those most beautiful moments of the past will also become unfamiliar due to the passage of time, and reality is often accelerating this process. And I’ve been too reliant on these good feelings, thinking they outweigh everything. Actually, I don’t know how to describe the various things after the overlap of fantasy and reality in relationships, just that various memory fragments seem to remind me in various ways that these things and emotions have truly happened. Just like many words once said and remembered or habits formed due to long-term companionship always appear like pranks at certain moments, some parts even seem to have become a symptom.
For example, every evening around six o’clock, I always think of what she said when she woke up from a nap at dusk looking out the window, she would feel particularly lonely and sad, as if she was the only person in this world. Maybe I always thought of myself as a strong person, and at that time I couldn’t fully empathize, just hoped that every time she woke up like this, I could be with her. And now it seems I’ve fallen into such a state, even feeling this loneliness when the surroundings are too quiet or too noisy, of course, that’s another topic.
Loneliness and Sense of Security
As mentioned earlier, I didn’t seem to be a person who was so afraid of loneliness before, or at least not very sensitive to it. But with the change in life state, my perception of loneliness has become increasingly apparent. Now, no matter what I do, it seems I need to play a podcast or white noise to slightly calm down, while music seems a bit too noisy, to the extent that I can’t concentrate on enjoying the melody, but only brings irritability. Perhaps I’ve placed too much pursuit of security on emotions, and when this part is missing, the overly protected sense of security dissipates, while the loneliness that coexists with it quickly invades my life. Perhaps for a long time to come, loneliness will be like a friend, always present. I haven’t learned how to get along with it yet, but I’m gradually getting used to its presence.
Perhaps gradually, I will place these dependencies on close friends, family, or other relationships. This ordinary thing is actually not an easy thing for me in the past. Whether out of fear of troubling others or so-called self-insistence, I seem to have a kind of self-protection even when facing relatives or the most trusted friends, and have a tendency to “report only the good news, not the bad”. I’m always unwilling to actively admit my weaknesses or share my emotions. This has nothing to do with familiarity, I just seem to be accustomed to showing all of myself in an intimate relationship, and sadly, many stages of love rely on fantasy and feelings, often unable to bear the side effects brought by a complete sense of reality. This is not to say that relationships need to be concealed or performed, but that relationships are not a perfect carrier for entrusting a sense of security. The part that relies on sensibility and atmosphere needs a certain distance and imagination to construct, and similarly needs to grasp its boundaries and balance.
Learning, Input and Output
This part will record some of the various audio-visual books I’ve seen, interesting things I’ve tinkered with, and some progress in work and study. Fortunately, according to the article “Using Automated Workflows to Aggregate Information Intake and Output”, I’ve set up my own “Yu’s Life Channel”, which automatically collects some of my active output and input, such as Twitter, Blog, bookmarks, and GitHub activities, which is very convenient for my weekly review.
Technical Learning
This week I started to return to the office, still not quite used to it after working from home for nearly two months, but being able to go out is also a good thing for emotional state. Because the project is about to end, the workload itself is not very large, but this week I need to familiarize myself with the fabric environment and some operations. Even if I’m not very interested, it’s still a very important part of work after all.
Recently, I’ve been mainly learning Solidity and Rust development, but this week because I went to the office, there was little complete time, and progress was general, need to re-plan. Then I plan to start re-learning and recording CSAPP, it’s time to settle down and supplement some of my technical and underlying knowledge.
This week I had some interesting discussions about blockchain and technology with a Leader, which also provided some reference for my future learning direction. The technology road is still very long, continue to work hard.
Input
I sorted out my GitHub Star list and projects, categorized some parts, and recorded them in Pinboard in the form of tags for management. I transferred some read-later items to Instapaper, which is now a relatively closed input flow. In practice, this way I’ve read quite a lot of valuable and nutritious content, and in the future, I need to focus more on in-depth learning in some fields.
In terms of audio-visual, this week I mainly watched “Mr. Robot”, an American TV series I watched a long time ago. I found it interesting, so I rewatched the first few seasons and watched the latest season; As for books, I haven’t finished “Lolita” from before, I’m slowly reading it during commutes, because of working from home, it’s been put aside for a long time.
Output
Writing is also the hobby that I’ve persisted with the longest and has been most effective, and I’ve even earned some unexpected remuneration. This week, besides work, I published an article “In 2022, Why Am I Still Blogging” on Sspai, which received good feedback. I met many people who are also blogging, exchanged with them, and by the way, improved the blog data statistics system. In addition, I received another commissioned article about blockchain, but it’s about stablecoin-related content that I’m not very familiar with, so I can do some research and learning first.
Software and Hardware Optimization
This week, I mainly moved the n8n service deployment to Railway via docker, so I don’t have to worry about service anomaly issues anymore, it will be a more stable system.
I achieved intranet penetration at home using frp, so I can directly ssh remote connect to the Mac Studio that’s always on at home from the office or when I’m out with just a Chromebook for development. Later I also plan to set up a Raspberry Pi, which can save a lot of cloud server costs, and I also want to tinker with some interesting things like temperature and humidity sensors.
The DJI RS3 camera stabilizer arrived, I tinkered with it and learned the basic operations, but I’m not very familiar with the balancing part, will slowly learn to use it later, can shoot more.
The new keyboard Leopold FC660C arrived, I like both its appearance and feel, it’s become the main keyboard at home now, and I took the HHKB to the office.
Habits, Interests and Changes
I find it hard to define whether I’m a person who likes change. I’m happy to accept new things and can adapt to a new environment relatively quickly, but for many familiar daily routines or parts that I still have attachment and emotional investment in, I try very hard to keep them in their original state. The layout of the home, the style of dress, even the order of color schemes in the wardrobe, I’ve retained the original state as if I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Even some of my behavioral patterns and habits in life, I seem unwilling to change. I find it hard to define these behaviors of mine, perhaps it’s an obsession with the past or changes that I’m unwilling to accept.
But actually, making some changes and attempts is also a very interesting thing, and it’s also suitable for exploring new lifestyles or interests. This part will also record some of my attempts and progress in cultivating interests.
Input method. I tried switching to Xiaohe Shuangpin, which I’ve been interested in for a long time but never had the patience to practice. It’s not really for how much improvement in typing speed, but I feel it’s an interesting experience to make a change to a habit I’ve (passively) insisted on for more than ten years. It’s been about three weeks, the speed hasn’t returned to that of full pinyin, but the rhythm of typing has improved a lot. More importantly, it seems that I’ve experienced the joy and pleasure brought by improvement from typing, which is hard to imagine could be obtained from something I’ve been doing for more than ten years.
Video editing. I’ve always wanted to do some shooting and editing. Although because of previous work and some daily interests, I’ve never been able to do any complete creation, maybe more is the cultivation of skills. I plan to start doing some shooting and editing, and by the way, learn how to use the stabilizer properly.
Exercise. I feel I’ve been staying at home for too long and haven’t exercised for a long time. I plan to start doing some daily exercises with Ring Fit Adventure, and when the weather is better, I can go skateboarding, at least maintain a relatively stable frequency.
Language. English reading and writing are used a lot in daily work and study, but I want to improve more in spoken language, and need to have a stable practice frequency; As for Japanese, I haven’t continued after finishing the New Standard Japanese Elementary level, I need to start doing some review and preparation as well.
Music. I sent the guitar at home over, after learning for a while in freshman year, it’s been put aside for a long time. I plan to do some practice later, at least music is an art that can make people relax and calm down, but it needs practice and persistence. I will also record some of the practice process and small works in video form.
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