dumping 3am thoughts

It has been around three years since I last wrote something here, and in those three years, I have picked up quite a few things. One of them being that life loves throwing the one thing I hate the most at me: uncertainty. On one hand, it is annoying. “Goddammit, I was just getting my daily life back on track. Not again.” On the other hand, it is more of a resigned, “Well, at least I have the resources to deal with it now. Sigh.”

Almost a decade ago, I left my parents’ place and moved to Delhi. Since then, things have rarely gone the way I predicted. Fortunately, from my perspective, they have turned out fairly well overall. And as much as I say “fortunately,” a significant part of that came down to sheer planning and anticipating what could go wrong.

Is fortune or luck a thing? Absolutely. But I think we give it more credit than it deserves sometimes, especially when the results are unfavorable.

Maybe the reason I have the resources to deal with uncertainty today is precisely because of all that planning.

Take moving to the Netherlands, just after COVID, for example. Finding a place to rent wasn’t exactly easy. Plenty of people ended up moving between temporary accommodations before finally finding an apartment.

I managed to find one within a month.

Was that luck? Maybe. But I had already made sure I had somewhere to crash if I couldn’t find a place soon enough. Finding an apartment that quickly might have been fortunate, but not having to panic if I didn’t was something I had planned for.

Of course, planning only gets you so far when half the things you deal with involve other people.

Living by myself in a different culture has taught me quite a bit about how my perception of myself shapes the way I deal with things. I am definitely a less trigger-happy individual these days. It has also made the differences between living in culturally heterogeneous and relatively homogeneous environments much more apparent to me. I have found myself thinking, “I can see why you would think that,” more often than, “That is stupid.”

Though, of course, I still have my “that is stupid” moments. I suppose I’ve just become a little better at distinguishing between things that are genuinely stupid and things that simply don’t make sense to me.

Those moments tend to be reserved for things where there is a reasonably objective right or wrong answer. Computers, for example, where shit is either a 0 or a 1. A couple of decades of messing around with computers, and that hasn’t changed. What has changed, though, is how much I want my life to revolve around them. I have been considering distancing myself from tech, apart from a few select areas. Maybe that is given me something to look forward to. Or maybe it is the other way around. Maybe I have finally found things to look forward to that don’t revolve around tech.

Instead of waking up thinking, “Shit, I have to go to work,” it’s now more like, “Well, I’ve got to earn enough to enjoy my next diving holiday.”. I think I finally understand why so many older people suggest finding someone to marry and starting a family once you have established a stable career. For them, their families were something to look forward to. Something that made all the mundane parts of life feel worthwhile.

Even with all that, I still fucking hate uncertainty.

Maybe people don’t fundamentally change all that much. Maybe they just get better at figuring out workarounds for the things that bother them. “Maybe” my ass. :wq