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Thinking things over recently, I would consider this period of time in my life to be going pretty well, on the whole. Of course I have struggled tremendously with Covid-era overexposure to the Internet, and Covid-era overexposure to a neverending stream of bad news, oh and there's a horrible pointless war unfolding live now, but relative privation fallacies aside I can confidently say that a lot is going pretty well in my life at the moment. I have a good, remote job in a promising career, I have a healthy long-term relationship, I still have the waning vestiges of my youth yet some wisdom and sense gained with age, and I have the time and money to pursue hobbies I'd like to pursue.
Moreover, though, I believe I am in a great spot in terms of nurturing my curiosity and actually acting upon it. You see, for much of the first 2-3 decades of my life I suffered from a strange sort of mental block. I was frequently told I was smart (which may have contributed to the problem) but came to understand myself as smart with words, and history, but not other things like math and science. I also had a poor understanding of skill; even though I superficially understood the value of practice, I generally thought you were either good at something, or you weren't. As a result, the child-and-teenage-me was good at what came pretty naturally, and didn't bother with the rest, because that other stuff was simply closed off to me, I thought.
I don't know who to blame for the fact that I placed myself in such a box early on. I don't know if I should blame anyone, besides myself. I doubt it was my parents, who made whatever mistakes they made but raised me to be kind, honest, and in possession of a moral compass. I don't want to blame the school system, because I got a pretty decent education, all things considered. Except for science. Save for my biology teacher, every high school science teacher I had systematically purged any interest I had in the subject well out of me. Especially you, Mr. G. Fuck you.
I digress, though. Through primary, secondary and tertiary education, I resided inside this box I had created for myself. "Soft" sciences good, in my wheelhouse, other sciences not good. Not for me. My one experience with a programming course didn't help, either: I got a C, and only that high because of Herculean efforts on my final project. Pretty sure I had some single-digit test and quiz scores. Ouch. But then I graduated and bailed on law school or any other choices available to a liberal-arts graduate with a decent education but no direction whatsoever. I spent the next decade rejecting a conventional career while I skied 100+ days a year. I had fun, and sometimes excelled in my job as a ski instructor, but couldn't shake the existential dread that I was pissing my life away and would eventually be old, broke, and unfulfilled.
Long story short, I made some moves. I identified Cybersecurity/Infosec as a possible career path. It ticked all the boxes I could think of - challenging, relevant, in demand, not in the service industry, and so on. I returned to school, tentatively at first. As someone who long boxed themselves into the "humanities-only" column of education, I was terrified of being exposed in this cold world of math, code, and numbers. The worst case scenario: I out myself as not so smart after all, and beyond that have no plan for improving my life and career prospects. Would be quite the nadir. So I did the one thing I could do. I worked my ass off.
And it worked. Rather than hitting a brick wall, I fell in love with the subject matter almost immediately. The tentative steps turned into larger commitments and I was soon enrolled in a not-inexpensive program which promised to get my foot in the door. Full steam ahead. School is work and isn't always fun, but I kept holding my breath for the day that I just hated it all and it never happened. All of this stuff was suddenly being demystified for me and I couldn't get enough. This enthusiasm carried me through the program and into my first job soon after.
The biggest takeaway, however, was the new way in which I saw learning. I realized that much of the knowledge I sought wasn't nearly as out of reach as I'd thought. I simply had to try harder, search more, spend more time reading. And this realization began to tear down the walls of the box I had long ago constructed for myself. I started to feel like I could try and learn anything I wanted, and even learn it well; it was simply a matter of being curious and putting in the work. Such an understanding may be self-evident for you reading this (and more power to you if so!), but I can't really articulate how empowering it was when I finally gained it at the ripe age of 30.
The title of this post may be pretentious as hell, but I want to appreciate this period in my life where I have the time and resources to pursue knowledge and skill coupled with the curiosity and motivation to actually see it through.
To this end, I have recently endeavored to use my free time as beneficially as possible. By this I mean putting in time and effort to improve some skill of mine each and every day. More specifically, my goal is to play/practice/create music and/or work on programming/some other technical skill for a few hours after work, every day. Preferably both, sure, but I don't want to burn myself out. Getting an L-shaped desk and putting my MPC on there turned out to be a wonderful life hack. I look at my music gear constantly while sitting at my computer, and in a true exemplification of "monkey see, monkey do" I am perpetually tempted to play with it. The video games can wait. I love them, but I have come to understand them as a sort of black hole. Time and effort go in, and nothing particularly interesting comes out, outside of the realm of the specific video game, of course.
That's not to say I don't want to game anymore - gaming has allowed me and my close group of friends to stay in touch despite the fact that I live halfway across the country from most of them. My ultimate dream remains to create a video game of my own. I am fascinated by the medium and how it encompasses so many other art forms: art, music, math, programming, writing, etc. But I'll never be in a position to make a game without developing some of those skills more. So, nose to the grindstone, moderately at least.