it’s difficult for me to explain why i’ve been living the way i’ve been living for the past 3 months: wake up, go to work, come home, read books and papers, sleep, repeat. on weekends sometimes i go to the office because it’s more pleasant than my room and i don’t have anywhere else to be; other times i walk around my favorite parks and stay there for hours on end. i know a good number of people in the area, but i don’t really hang out with them unless there’s a specific event or occasion. i feel like a shell of myself, like i’ve been put through a furnace and all my insides have transmuted into smoke. once in a while i go to parties and become extremely conscious of the fact that, for now at least, i am an incredibly boring person to talk to
everything i do feels oddly lethargic. sometimes i write it off as oh i’m just adjusting to moving to a new city or i’m still figuring out what the right things to do in my free time are or my current living situation is exhausting and things will get better when i move out or i am sad about leaving mit and breaking up or (if i’m being dramatic) moving to sf has left me in a state of shock and given me permanent psychic damage, but all of those statements are only half-truths. i think the more accurate description here is hibernation. i have been hibernating, waiting for something to wake me up; not just waiting, maybe hoping or expecting - i’ve been expecting someone to come and save me
and maybe that sounds like an incredibly stupid thing to expect, but it’s worked out before - three years ago when i was bored out of my mind and wanted something to end the monotony of the pandemic and ended up in an amazing coliving house in the desert, two years ago when i was tired of the obsession over recruiting and decided i would refuse to apply to jobs and instead wait for people to reach out to me and ended up in the exact engineering environment i was looking for, and so on. with the benefit of hindsight i can safely say that waiting around was the right action to take in those situations, that if i’d tried to go off and “be proactive” and solve everything myself i almost certainly would’ve ended up with much worse outcomes. my takeaway from these experiences was that life throws a lot of opportunities your way and something good eventually comes up if you search actively and patiently. when i talk about “being saved” that’s what i’m referring to, not divine intervention or anything like that
(by the way, this is approximately equivalent to the advice from hell yeah or no - that you should keep your schedule free and say no to almost everything so that you can pounce on the really great things when they come up)
anyway, lately i’ve been thinking that this probably isn’t the right way to frame things. it’s true that sometimes you don’t know what you’re missing and all you can do is wait for that thing to present itself to you. it’s also true that there are many different forms of waiting, and if waiting feels like suffering or wasting away then you’re probably doing it badly
i have a habit of ignoring large swaths of my life while focusing on improving other parts of my life, like i’ll figure out hobbies once i’m better at my job or i’ll get around to meeting more people when i’m in a better living situation. it’s related to this weird fallacy that you can wait for some conditions to be met before starting life for real - obviously that’s not the case, life has already started and neglecting it doesn’t change the fact that it’s started. i’m not really sure where this habit came from but i’m trying to break it when i see it; after all there’s no reason why i shouldn’t be able to work on two things at the same time
one time i had a crush on someone, let’s call them k, and i was holding off on mentioning it to k until i was more confident that they liked me. after mulling over it for a few weeks i realized i would never be particularly confident that k liked me and i was really just waiting for the sake of waiting. so when i finally talked to k the primary reason wasn’t that i liked them or wanted to date them or whatever, it was just… this overwhelming sense that life was passing by and i was running out of time, and if i was planning to eventually do something anyway and wasn’t really waiting on anything i might as well just go do the thing now
so it’s taken a few months but i’ve finally realized that i’m on my own this time. which isn’t the same as saying that other people are incapable of helping me - my coworkers invite me to events, there were several incidents where my friends almost managed to resolve my housing problems, i’ve had some great conversations lately, etc. and i’m extremely grateful to everyone who’s helped me adjust to living in sf - maybe what i’m really trying to say is that it doesn’t really matter if someone comes to save me or not; i can’t possibly tell the difference right now and either way it doesn’t excuse how little effort i’ve been putting into my own life. i’ve waited long enough. it’s time to get back to being myself
thanks for writing this
i felt this way earlier this year when i recently left the place i was working at. i was unemployed for 2 months and felt like my life was on standstill while everyone around me was living it. it was really hard to find any spark or liveliness in my life—i spent most days alone and working on things that i wasn't sure would lead to anything.
i am trying to develop a stronger, almost irrational, sense of self-belief. truly believing that i will be okay and figure out whatever situation i'm in. my hunch is that the majority of discontent/anxiety/exhaustion that we feel is because we have an idea of where we want to be or what our lives should look like, but our present selves aren't there yet (and sometimes we can't even see how we'll get there). but it gets easier to live the day-to-day if you cultivate a stronger sense of security and faith in yourself, even if that faith feels irrational.
again, thanks for sharing and always happy to chat!