Purpose
I have these usual flashes of random memories from my younger years, where life for me was split between heaven and hell. Hell was having to go to school every day; I always found my pure joy while being in front of electronics as opposed to being in a classroom. I remember many things about how I acted, but as much as I try, I'm just not able to understand what my thought process was back then.
My heaven was a simple thing: the anxious craving to get home from school, enjoy the plate of food that was waiting for me, at the time, the classical chicken with rice felt like a gourmet meal, and get to my room with the plate to watch SpongeBob. Then I would get to the living room to do whatever was on my mind on my Dell 8400 running Windows XP. This was usually just playing Adobe Flash games, downloading random games on Ares (malware, likely), trolling my sister and her friends on Hi5, or messing around with the registry. My afternoons were mostly just for the sake of playing games. My mom sent me to bed early, like 9 pm. I was 10 but still afraid of sleeping alone and usually had an existential crisis about my mortality, so getting back to the living room to enjoy the computer once she fell asleep was the usual move.
I would spend the night on shenanigans projects with PHP. Dreamweaver was such a fascinating piece of technology back then with its server snippets, particularly messing around with doing a self-hosted Habbo or trying to copy Facebook, which to some degree I succeeded at on a basic level. I was raised with principles, but at that specific moment in my life, I didnāt have such an upholding of what it was to respect the digital privacy of others. So I just stored the passwords in plaintext and shared the link around the circle of folks I knew. Of course, they happened to reuse their passwords, and that led me to exploring. It was funny, like this one girl telling her bff why she told her out in public that her armpits smelled bad, and other just weird things. But then I did feel bad about it in the sense of morality, but also pathetic. Because yeah, I was quite young, but that wasnāt anything sophisticated; it was betraying the folks that had trusted me.
My mother, seeing me so obsessed with the computer and getting into occasional trouble, decided it was best to try to get me out of it with all possible kinds of activities.
First, it was baseball; I sucked and it was dreadful. Then basketball, same output. Then tennis, same. Then swimming, same. Then soccer, in which the coach particularly made me a goalkeeper and team captain out of the blue. I think perhaps he liked me because we shared the same last name, but either way, that just made my existence more dreadful as I also sucked and made all the other kids hate me. Then it was painting, which was the activity I sort of liked the most but also sucked at. So after I was failing in all that, and I also got the worst possible grades and had a usual hyperactivity behavior, the only activity that was left for me was being taken to psychological therapy, which in the end also didn't amount to much. So at the end, I guess I was just left to be happy with my computer. There was not much to do with me.
So the split continued: feeling dreadful at school, anxious to go back home to be happy. I remember being in the hallways thinking, "Will I ever be able to make it out? Will this ever end?" because it really seemed like being on an infinite loop back then. Over a decade went by and somehow, yeah, I did get out. But still, I look back and I wonder, how the fuck did I learn any of that? I got my first computer when I was 8. It was just gifted to me with no instructions. How did everything stack up for me to be deploying phpMyAdmin, dealing with SQL, and FTPāing my projects to 000webhost with FileZilla?
And it feels quite surreal to me, because back then if anyone had asked me how that worked, how the CPU or memory operated, or what a programming language even was, I donāt think I would have been able to answer precisely. So how I learned all that is still an unknown to me.
Now Iām 24, and I look back and I canāt even believe that epoch, which at the time felt endless, even existed. Because now I think of it and it seems like it was yesterday, even though a lot has happened within that period of time.
As much as I wanted to make it out of the shell back then, now at times I feel like I want to make it back in. Because in reality, ignorance is really bliss.
Weāve been on this place for millions of years, our species for just some hundreds of thousands. Out of those hundreds of thousands, only the latest 10k years were the ones that advanced us to where we are today, and out of that is a minimal fraction. Of the total time the Earth has been around, it's more minimal, a much more minimal fraction on the scale of the universe. Yet those seem significant to us; we gained a better understanding of the mind and of existence, but perhaps thatās only advanced relative to our interface.
Sometimes it feels depressing to think that weāre living in āancientā times that seem relatively modern. I wonder what the world will be like in the next 100 years and how future generations will look back on these times. Very likely as a primitive epoch. But perhaps, if this goes on long enough, every new batch arriving here will recursively feel the same.
So far, each period of my life has brought its own distinct flair, which makes me think the memories I recall as distant somehow feel recent, and the actual recent ones coexist in the same parallel dimension, while I merely spawn into a new one, each day closer to the end.
But itās good to keep constantly in memory oneās own meaninglessness in the vastness of time.
I vividly recall over a decade ago as if it were yesterday. Fast-forward, Iām 24 now and have already lived ~40% of my life, if Iām lucky. So the rest will feel like a blink.
Feels like it was just a flash, a sporadic moment. Still, itās good, because it gives a sense of direction.
I particularly don't believe thereās an after, as much as there isnāt a before. So being introspective about it helped me find purpose and to value every minute that I've got left in here. If I were to scroll 5 minutes a day on social media, that would be ~30 hours a year. If I've got 36 years left in here and I spend another 20 years doing that, it will compound to over a full year of brain rot. And perhaps 30 hours may not look like much, but if one is to think about how much those same 30 hours a year compounded in growth activities may yield, it would make a much more satisfactory life, I think.
So, if I donāt get to take anything and everything just goes away, my purpose and ambition are simple: replace the stupid hedonic, mundane part of me with the pleasure of continuing to seek learning about what this place is and building for others to come.