I’ve been trying to find my raison d’être for starting to write.
For a while, I tried relying on the FOMO of seeing those closest around me write (Emil, Vivian, even Ilinca and Thuraya’s goodreads reviews). I’ve also tried to gaslight myself into the desire to balance my overconsumption of brainrot with some production. But the excuses just piled up and starting this little writing gig soon became harder than my postgrad machine learning course - until I realised I can literally just write about why I should write.
Anyhow, I won’t take this writing gig too seriously - in a sense, I won’t try to perfect each piece and publish, but probably momentarily write up and dump my brains onto the page.
I’ve always seen writing as medium of thinking for yourself ahead of time; you know, like writing a script for your future conversation. I’ve also come to the belief that forming my own world view and series of predictions will probably be the best life/career guidance I can have at this point of life. There’s nothing more exciting to me than hearing others gush about their convictions with unparalleled passion; there’s something revealing about one’s personality via their ideas (platitudes and niche ones alike). Perhaps my reason shall be this for now: I will write to figure out where my convictions lie.
For most parts of education and life, I’ve been dabbling in things that sort of appeared to me as interesting with no true optimisations. I mediocrely dipped my toes in a range of fields (briefly academic research, government, finance and tech) I cared about at the time, only to catch myself in boredom at the end of it.
Maybe it’s my reels-infected attention span. Maybe it wasn’t for me. Truth is, I’ve been told over and over again that doing one thing well will probably get you furthest in life; but sticking to one thing always seemed to risky to me - it’s my fear of boredom and the dread of the climb up. But the facts don’t lie, high optionality breeds mediocrity.
For selfish and maybe altruistic reasons (go open source!), fleshing all my ideas and predictions via writing may reveal something deeper about my world view or might hopefully serve as a springboard for further discussions. I’m more likely to spot my own bs on paper than in my head.
A last note, I’ve always been fortunate enough to be closely surrounded by those who either are on are bullish on a mission with no temptation to pivot or a very well-cut optimised prestigious paths (law, banking and big tech), making it clear what their next step might be.
To simply put it: I’m surrounded by excellence and I need to take my next steps to catch up, but I can’t do that until I figure out the bearings for my bullishness. And that is one heck of a topic to start writing about.
Stay tuned for my following pieces to come shortly, I’ve been half baking a lot.