Weekly Review #22 - Involution and Anxiety

Preface

This is a record and reflection of my life from 2022-12-07 to 2022-12-13.

It’s been about 20 cumulative days since I last stepped out of my home. Given the current workload of multiple concurrent projects and the almost-cleared negative status, I haven’t planned to return to the office yet. I’m even considering staying at home until before the new year. The self-quarantine life is quite pleasant.

The busy work and side projects have blurred the line between weekends and workdays. However, years of ingrained habits still give me the illusion that “weekends are my own time, isn’t it a waste to just sleep?” Plus, without the pressure of morning meetings, I’ve been staying up later. Nevertheless, I’ve done quite a few interesting things, explored some topics I’ve always wanted to learn and applied them to projects, and even made some demo toys. I’ve been in a rather happy state throughout.

In other moments, I watched the Netherlands match with a close friend in Australia via voice call (though they lost), and learned that I’ll receive a delightful gift (although it’ll be delivered to Hong Kong, and I can’t get it for now). A friend of mine, influenced by me, has also started writing weekly reviews, and we’re urging each other to update (though I’ve procrastinated for a few days again). My cat now understands her name, and a simple “Nie Nie, come here” can summon her from any corner of the house, just like a Pokémon. And many other interesting things.

Involution and Anxiety

In the latest learning record video by polebug, I saw a discussion about involution and anxiety. Personally, I’m not very fond of the word “involution”. Calling oneself “involuted” seems to carry a sense of superiority and self-satisfaction. Hearing others evaluate it this way reminds me of the peculiar feeling I had as a child when teachers would say, “This child isn’t smart, but he’s always hardworking and deserves encouragement.”

“Involution” seems to go hand in hand with the pervasive sense of anxiety nowadays, stemming from work project pressures, confusion about one’s direction or dissatisfaction with the pace of improvement, and the so-called peer pressure. We tend to place ourselves on the negative side of our current stage, often influenced by certain arguments to deny ourselves, and then squeeze our free time through various forms of self-satisfying efforts, often ending up physically and mentally exhausted.

I prefer the description of “TIL” that’s more commonly mentioned abroad. Today I Learned - beyond completing basic or repetitive work duties, what have you learned? It could be reading some leisure books or reference books, learning a new technology or summarizing previous experiences into writing, starting a new project or optimizing existing ones. As long as it’s within the realm of curiosity and thirst for knowledge, it can be called a “TIL”.

Learning and exploration itself is an interesting thing, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be directly related to results or benefits. Although it might sound a bit cliché, my limited experience has always led me to believe in a kind of “uselessness is useful” mindset. Often, things done out of interest, curiosity, or other pure purposes in the past bring surprises at some stage in the future. What we need to do is often just follow our hearts and wait quietly.

Daily Life with “Nie Nie”

This week has been another stay-at-home life together. I can gradually feel the trust and emotional dependency being built (and she’s also become much more unrestrained). She would quietly sleep in front of the keyboard amid the noisy voices and keyboard clicks while I’m busy in various meetings. When I haven’t paid attention to her for a long time, she would circle around my feet, craving for a hug. She would watch the World Cup with me, focusing on the movements on the field. She would parkour into my blanket before sleep, and even step on my face to “wake” me up when I’m reluctant to get out of bed to change her food.

Other

This section will record my input and output, as well as other things I find interesting.

Technology

Due to the needs of a side project, I properly studied React this week, following some courses I had previously bought on Udemy. I feel that front-end development is quite interesting now. When I was in college, I earned some extra money by writing websites. I remember at that time, I was cobbling together HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on my own. I think I used jQuery to get elements or something. I remember using ThinkPHP then, and there was some MVC framework. Even the WeChat mini-program I made later feels like a relic of the past now.

Because I haven’t written front-end for a long time and don’t have much technological baggage, I used JavaScript + React + TailWind CSS + daisyUI to cobble together a demo practice project “GitHub Finder” for finding GitHub users and repos. I feel that there are now many more tool chains and libraries for writing front-end. I barely wrote any CSS for the entire project, and the mobile responsiveness is pretty good too. It’s quite comfortable.

However, the project I need to use later requires TypeScript + Next.js + TailWind CSS, so this demo is just for building a foundation.

Interestingly, after writing a lot of JavaScript these two weeks, the other day when I was screen sharing with a small leader in my work to modify Go code, I instinctively used .length to get the length of an array. It took me a while to realize after it reported an error. I could feel the confusion from the other side of the screen, as if I had forgotten how to write Go after just a few days away from it, haha.

I feel like I’m getting closer and closer to being able to cobble together some interesting little tools. I’m happy about that.

Input

Anime

• The Three-Body Problem, I had been looking forward to the animated version of The Three-Body Problem for a while. Two episodes have been released. I personally have read about half of the original novel, but I’m not a big fan and don’t have much “faith” in it. Overall, I think it’s pretty good. The visuals and pacing are decent.