Every 6 months I have a shift in my mental thinking. This is usually significant enough for me to go “Oh wow, I think this is the last biggest shift I will be going through for a while”. Alas, it happens to me again once or sometime twice a year.

I had initially taken this the wrong way. “I am changing too much”, “I can’t have stable priorities”, “Am I still maturing?”. I’ve even had a constant swing from minimalism to maxmalism, in the way I live and in the way I use technology. In fact you can see this across my 5 previous websites for hegdeatri.com. It kept bouncing, and in my head “improving”. But was it really though. This is the question that stumped me. Am I really improving, or is the mindset shift really all just an illusion and I just keep improving at a standard rate.

This is the shape of the question, more or less:

With this reframe, I feel like shifts are not a sign of instability at all. Maybe they are just what steady, standard-rate growth feels like from the inside - a series of jumps.

How I reframed my outlook on life

Now to stop myself from being compmletely surprised each time I feel like I leveled up, it was clear to me that I must be more self aware, and must critical reflect upon experiences when I can. This will allow to be feel much more consistent and focused. The main problem I realised was the drift of clarity and focus when I do not self reflect, or keep a log book of sorts. In the past when I did this, I tried to make myself look as busy as possible. This meant that there was a lot of bullshit in my logbook. What was supposed to track my progress to my goals, tracked my random meetings, batch meal preps and lazy movie nights. This made me feel good cause I was writing shit down and feeling “productive”, even though what I did all day was clean my house, shop for groceries, clean my desk and go through my emails. Yes it was a step in the right direction, but I was subconsciously rewarded too much for it. The mental masturbation to make myself look good is crazy in hindsight.

Now I am treating goals a lot more like goals, and instead of having a fixed outlook on what I want for myself in the future, I think about it in a lot more abstract, yet well defined terms. How many kids I want to have had, what mental state want to be in, what I will be spending most of my time on. (family, side projects, work, hobbies, sports, updating my emacs config, etc)

Thinking about my Career

Now I took this newly found realisation that I am “consistently growing” and tried to see I could feel it day to day. Truth be told, I feel like I am actually regressing, but perhaps it is the constant fear of regressing that makes me actually improve and push forward. This however, had already lead me to burn out a couple of months ago, especially with improvements in the A.I. space, I felt as if any new skill I learn would be made obselete by AI before I could truly master that skill. It felt like had been given two choices:

1. Go under a rock and master a tool, pray you learn and experience enough to not get replaced
2. Try the new AI thing everyday, and become more stupid.

Realising this I obvious chose to try to master a skill, and the skill I chose is Rust. Now to be frank I did seriously question whether I should’ve chosen C++, Zig or GoLang, but ultimately just stuck with Rust. Mainly because I like building myself CLIs, TUIs and other “engines” (sync engines, migration tools, etc) and have found Rust very fun to code with. I know it is not the most performant, or it is not something that results in the least number of assembly lines/instructions, but it is a compromise I am willing to make.

Avoiding the Reset

One thing I used to do before was to completely reset or change things up when I had a moment of realisation. I would make a new website, I would change my sleep routine, workout schedule, my short-term goals, etc. That is the exact pitfall that I want to avoid from now one. Not only will it save me tons of mental bandwidth, but also let me see the fruits of prolonged effort.

Bringing it together

I have done a lot of things chasing fulfillment of life, while fighting my materialistic greed. It is definitely causes a lot of internal strife as today I want to be a self sustained farmer in the country side, and in the next I want to live running a company in the bustlings streets of a city. I want both a rugged Jeep that is battered and is fully serving its purpose, and also a Rolls Royce, that not only needs a driver, but needs to be washed and taken care of more than a dog.

I talked to my close friend about this and he said this:

Why not have both?

This is when I realised that I thought I would be “happy” at the end of it. As if it would be like the peace after a war. But that is not how life works at all.

I still don’t know what I want for my future, but all I know is this, my duties to take care and provide food, shelter and time with my family comes first, then comes my sense of fulfillment, then comes my greed to accumulate wealth large enough to leave a legacy and be able to make a positive impact on the world by helping the less privileged, helping the environment, and building infrastructure in my home country, India.