i think this hiatus is now officially the longest i've gone without writing something, since i first published my personal website.
lately i've had multiple people reach out to me about the things i write on here. it's kind of cool to see that some people are actually reading this stuff. i was initially pretty hesitant with how honest i wanted to be / how much of myself, my personality, and my thought processes i wanted to expose. i'm glad that the trade off seems to be paying off and that people who come across my website are finding the blogs interesting or meaningful.
i have a lot of stuff i've been thinking about over the past few months and don't really have a good way to lay my thoughts out coherently. i'll probably just start word vomiting and see if i need to clean it up later.
on purpose
for those who know me, i'm usually pretty vocal in my critiques of the education system, and how i think we tend to overemphasize doing well in school / how much value we derive from class (specifically applicable only to my experiences with pre-college education & computer science. i think there are a lot of fields where education is still deeply valuable and necessary, e.g. medicine higher education, where there's a big emphasis on knowing your stuff. you can't really FAFO when lives are at stake).
however, i've only recently come to realize what i now think is the single most unforgivable flaw of the education system: it never conditions us to dig deeper within ourselves for the why.
over the last few months, i've come to realize how damaging the structure of the education system really is, in teaching us to evaluate why we want to do things. and the reason for this, in my opinion, comes down to spoon-feeding outcomes.
i've always been a "high-achiever" in school, and quite honestly didn't really have to try all that hard for the most part until i got older. but i'm realizing now that my reasons for doing work and wanting to achieve good outcomes were superficial and entirely one dimensional. in elementary and middle school i frankly didn't have to try at all and hardly remember studying outside of just doing my assignments. in high school it was obvious: i need good grades, a solid suite of extracurriculars, etc. to get into a good college. and once i got to the good college, the next step was equally obvious: i need to pass all my classes, get internships, etc. so i can set myself up to get hired out of college.
and then it all happened. i didn't think anything of it. i figured i'd just start my job, ride off into the sunset, having made it to the final destination and making my own money, without a problem in the world, until the end of time, as jolly as could be. i had done it, after all.
then, i started. naturally, working as a software engineer is not a cakewalk. i am surrounded by some of the most intelligent and hardworking people in an industry that already largely self-selects for intelligent and hardworking people. and a job is not high school; it is hard. it takes time, effort, dedication, perserverance, etc. etc. etc. all qualities which school was supposed to have instilled in me. all qualities that i was supposed to have cultivated as a so called "high achiever."
and then, it started to dawn on me. 2, 3, 4 months in, i was still here. things were not changing. there is no "next quarter" to serve as a soft reset to do it all over again. there are no grades to farm so that i can progress to gain admission into the next educational institution. there is just me, and the work that needs to be done. and then, a pretty horrifying question started emerging: why am i even doing this?
obviously, there must necessarily be some sort of quality, some intrinsic motivator inside me that was compelling me to do this work. if not, i would just not be doing it. but how could i possibly know so little about myself that i was spending basically all my time doing stuff without even knowing why?
i'm starting to realize that school has conditioned me, and others like me, to chase outcome-driven work. the entire education system is predicated on the concept of short-to-medium term success in direct exchange for work that is put in now. there is no concept of innate motivation, no chance to question why the work should be done. and that leads to class after class of "high achievers" like myself being churned out of the system as nicely decorated "grade machines" that are capable of putting in work to achieve an outcome, but are not clear on what the value of that work is outside of the direct outcome being chased. and that kind of philosophy simply doesn't hold up when one starts a career. there is no "shiny object." there is no direct moment where the work pays off and you "get in." there is just more work.
and what that means, for people like me born into privilege such that we don't have to work for survival, and trained to chase short-term gratification in direct exchange for work, is that this is the first time we ever have to question: why?
to be honest, i still don't really know yet. what i can say with certainty is that there is something there. at the end of the day, i'm still here, still working, and still trying my best. i don't yet have an answer i'm happy with for what that is though. all i can say is that the answers i've come up with so far ("i work because it's just what you do," "i work because i view what i produce as a reflection myself") are surface-level and often not really true if i introspect honestly. i'm still trying to figure it out.
on symbols
i've always been really against superstition, pretty much to a point. there are a lot of superstitious practices in india so this is actually something that's come up quite frequently for me. but i'm really mostly just being a contrarian. i am really into symbols / symbolism, and to be completely honest these "symbols" are basically just a proxy for superstition.
in my first year of college, my mom went to india and brought me back a chain with a charm that has a regional deity on it. i basically haven't taken it off in the 4 years since.
a few months ago, i went and got my ears pierced. my parents were initially horrified and angry (as i had expected) but came to terms with it and are now completely fine with it. part of it was that it was really out of the blue as i had never really thought about getting my ears pierced before. and while one of the reasons is definitely that i think it looks cool, one of the big factors i've never shared with anyone is that this is another one of my "symbols."
in the Mahabharata, there is a character named karna who is basically the indian equivalent of achilles. his dad is the sun god and when he is born, he is gifted a set of kavacha and kundala, armor and earrings respectively. as long as he is wearing them, he is completely invulnerable and cannot be harmed by anything.
he ends up fighting for the "wrong" side in the war due to circumstances described in the epic, but in order to defeat him, one of the gods basically has to approach him while disguised and beg him for his armor and earrings. because karna is so noble and virtuous, he gives them up without any hesitation. this leaves him vulnerable during the war and ultimately is what allows him to be killed by one of the protagonists, arjun.
i wanted to get my ears pierced because my charm and earrings would be my little version of the kavacha and kundala. my reassurance that as long as i'm wearing them, i can get through anything and things will work out.
i know that for all intents and purposes this is superficial and meaningless. i am afforded no protection by wearing a necklace and earrings. but i'm becoming a lot more open to this kind of stuff as i grow older. i view superstition / "symbolism" kind of like placebo effects in medicine. half the battle is just showing up and believing. and i think there's nothing wrong with using superstitions and beliefs as a vehicle to do that.
on "hard things"
i've always hated the idea that "hard things are worth doing because they're hard." i've always held a really strong belief that you should always take the easiest way out to solving something. i think this kind of thinking is a lot more accepted (and even celebrated) in engineering -- the whole idea that the best person to hire is the one who's smart and lazy, because they'll always figure out a better way to do things that takes less work.
i think i'm starting to change my perspective on this now though. i still wholeheartedly hate the idea that doing things that are hard has intrinsic value because the thing is hard. but i think version of this that resonates with me more is that things do not have inherent value because they are hard or easy. you should do the thing that needs to be done. if it's easy, that's great. if it's hard, do it anyway -- because it's what should be done.
i think this is another thing i'm grappling with now that i'm out of school and living my "adult" life for the first time. i'm realizing what an immense privilege i've had to live a childhood so free of hardships, that i've never really had to do anything hard. and if i'm evaluating things objectively, i honestly still haven't really done anything hard.
but i am starting to understand the sentiment now a little bit now. i think it's really hard to evaluate just how much resilience a person has until they've done something hard. something where there was no "out," and they just had to struggle and possibly even fail. and i think you can learn a lot about people (i'm definitely learning a lot about myself) based on how they respond in those kinds of situations.
where i'm at
i'm realizing a lot of things about life and about myself, a lot of which i've discussed above. but more than anything, i'm realizing that it takes a lot of work (beyond literally going into work every day) to make sure you stay on top of things, healthy, happy, and polished in all your skills.
i feel like balancing physical activity, stress, healthy diet, and sleep can be a full time job in and of itself. and on top of that, i've recently started to feel like i really need to be coding more again. i feel like in the last few months i've been so tapped into leveraging agents, internal tooling, corporate processes, etc. to get the direct task in front of me done, that i'm starting to lose some of the analytical and coding skills i built up over the years.
i'm continuing to learn a lot about what it means to work hard, what i value in life, how to deal with stress, and how little i've actually accomplished in the grand scheme of things compared to where i was valuing myself at and what the incredible and accomplished people i'm surrounded by are capable of.
but above all, i'm realizing that i'm not going to have all the answers now. it's not all going to make sense immediately. it's a journey that's just now starting, and one that everyone is constantly going through and developing / refining new answers to no matter how far they get in their lives / careers.