2024-12-15 Journal Entry

I should’ve started writing this journal about 4 hours ago, but I didn’t. I mostly just sat around and watched YouTube videos for a while.

But I’m really not going to berate myself about it, because instead of doing it for about 8 hours, I only did it for 4. Instead of a 5 minute sit I got a 20 minute sit in today. All of these sound like small wins in a world where I’m supposed to be doing shit all the time, but even getting a journal in at all is a real improvement over the last few weeks where I didn’t do one at all. And I somewhat realize at this point how this is all the act of recovery. I only left my job two weeks ago (not even!), so the fact that I’m just not coming to terms will all of the absolute enormity of what I’m doing is pretty interesting. And so here I am, on the literal other side of the world, looking at the Burj Khalifa and writing about my life. What a far cry this is from where my life was just literally weeks ago!

But let’s not make this terribly naval-gazy.

Actually. I don’t really want to be writing this journal right now, and instead I feel motivated to be writing the several pieces I’ve had sitting in the back of my mind. Let’s do those instead. Reese, out.

JK, I’m back. And I’m back because I really don’t know exactly what I want this piece to be. I often write these sorts of “meditations” at first and then structure them later, but that’s really what this journal is. The essays should be something more substantive!

And so what do I want to write about? I think I want to say a few different things. Something about the feeling of openness, the both daunting and exciting feeling of wide-open possibilities before you with very few constraints save for your own imagination. Another thing is essentially just a challenge: would you do this if you could? Bill Perkins book may be a bit relevant here, although I’m really actually backfilling his work onto mine, so maybe it’s a bit irrevelant. The main thing I think I want to nail down is just how brief life is – that’s kinda the Big Scary Thing that I’ve realized when I hit 28, especially Mom’s passing, is that we’re all going to die for real, and that the experiences that you think you want to have are not going to indeed happen on their own. And more importantly, your mark on the world isn’t going to just happen. I don’t yet know how exactly I’m going to be making that impact myself, but it also may be a bit about articulating what exactly it is that I’m looking for. I realize full well that I may not have articulated much of that to my coworkers very well. Hell, I don’t really think I’ve even articulated it to myself very well. When I say “the best thing to be working on,” what exactly does that mean? What’s the biggest, scariest problem out there?

I think the thing that most scares me is that none of us really have any idea what’s going on. With ourselves, with others, like we’re all out here living longer lives and making the world objectively better, which is great, and then all the while we never really get much clearer on the more fundamental questions of why we’re here at all. Hell, we may even be bringing sentient beings into the universe (read: AI, or children) without much considering why we feel so strongly towards doing that.

But of course I don’t feel like I have an answer here, and it seems bizarre to me that we don’t really spend more calories on this sort of thing. It’s a luxury to be able to do so, no doubt about that, and the sooner you become comfortable with it, the better. And it feels odd to have an answer here, or rather that it’s unanswerable. What I want most, I suppose, is for all of us to be more comfortable in the world than to go to such great lengths unwittingly trying to avoid them. To look ourselves plainly in the face and see how we paper over our insecurities.