I learned a lot of things last year. At the beginning of the year, I sought to read more books and finish an online course to build webapps. I will go one by one on notable things I did.
I completed an online course
This course took me seven months to finish. I did not expect it to take that long. At the beginning of the year, I tried to study a lot more frequently compared to the very minimal progress that I made during the last quarter of 2023. I was expecting it to be finished in around four months or so, but apparently it took double the time. I think it’s mostly because I procrastinated.
The course itself was really hard, I have never learned it before and it took time for my brain to understand since I’m not that good in understanding a concept within a first try haha. I also registered a credit card because I used a hosting service that used Stripe. I also renewed and moved the registrar of this domain to porkbun from domainesia cause they have really bad customer service. Once I finished it, I tried to make an app but it looks ugly since the course didn’t teach how to style a webapp so I tried to learn that, but I gave up.
A world without borders
I’ve been learning the language for four years and in 2023 I talked to a few people so I tried to do more last year. I met them online from this website. It took a lot of tries to find the right cold email message. If I got a reply, I had a 15:1 ratio of meeting the right kind of person. At first I used an app called tandem and hello talk but it doesn’t give me good suggestions of people who are serious and are not creepy. It is also lopsided, so many old men in their 30s or 40s. I have no idea why. I typed my own version of introductory text and I ran it through ChatGPT. LLMs like ChatGPT has helped me so much, it can also translate text very accurately.
So I managed to talk to about a few dozen people. From those, only a handful that I still exchange messages with on a daily basis. I also had a lot of multi hour phone call, which was really hard at first because I could understand everything that they’re saying but I couldn’t say a single word. And then I started trying to speak, to say simple sentences or phrases that I know is appropriate or correct based on hours of immersion but it was really hard. It took me months to get used to it. But now I can reasonably talk in Korean which I’m very proud of. I think highschool me would be very surprised that I would get this far. I’m definitely not in any definition of the word, fluent. I’m just so happy that I’m able to talk to someone, in their native language, 5000 kilometers away in real time.
Even though I had done this kind of thing since I was young, because I’ve talked to a lot of Americans or Europeans online, but it’s different since it’s very niche. Korean only has 50 million or so speakers (excluding the North because they’re isolated) and definitely I’m not the first one to do this. I’m nowhere near the 90th percentile of foreigners who can speak this language well, but given my life is marred by incompetencies and failure and guilt-ridden-regrets; it’s like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Somehow there is hope, as long as I’m willing to put in the work, to get good at something and reap the benefits afterward.
I got my first salary
I got my first job last year. I edited (officially it’s called typesetting) a Webtoon that is translated to Japanese using Photoshop. The pay is very low but I learned a lot in dealing with systems and bureaucracy. And it was a good opportunity for me to realize that my CV is empty. The whole recruitment process took a month and I took two projects but I was so busy dealing with school that I decided not to renew the contract. I initially thought that my skill wouldn’t be sufficient because I hadn’t used Photoshop extensively for like three years by that point, but I managed to get by while constantly searching on YouTube on how to use certain features of Photoshop.
What I learned the most is that making money is really hard. I don’t just mean hard in a sense that you have to put effort, both physically and mentally, but work itself is hard. For some reason it reminds me of this line from Genesis:
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
“Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life”. Since late highschool I’ve always thought that I would be willing to do any job in any field so long as the pay is good and it’s not a job that I obviously dislike, and now it seems that is true. The very definition of working means that it will be hard. Even if someone is very lucky and they happen to be “passionate” in the field that they’re working on, there’ll be moments where it is not so pleasing.
I joined an entrepreneurship bootcamp
There’s this program from the government and my uni hosted one so naturally, because I had nothing to do I registered for it. I have never joined any kind of activities outside of school itself, so this was a first for me. I joined because it would add something to my CV. I managed to save a couple hundred thousand rupiah because each student get one million IDR in endowments. The program lasted for four months until the end of the year. It was very tiring for me but it was worth it because it is exactly what I expected it to be.
I’m still not sure what I learned from this. I think I met like five or so entrepreneurs who are very successful and they came from a very humble background (the rest are just your average motivator/self help guru). One dude even went to the same uni as I do. Their businesses are in the millions of dollar range which is insane to think about. It’s dizzying when you hear someone that makes so much money. It is also, very inspiring at the same time. Like I have no excuse now at this point. The least that I can do is try to build a business and fail miserably at it because then I can at least say that I’ve tried. But again, these people they’re very relentless. They failed so many times yet they don’t give up. Why? How could anyone be so stubborn? They wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Last year, I spent around three hours a day watching YouTube or the latest Netflix series. It’s a massive slap in the face when I actually met these people in real life. God forbid any of my classmates will be that successful because then I don’t know what to do; like I would question what I’ve been doing my whole life. And I’m getting older, I’m 21 now, soon I have to make a decision. Not an easy one to make (but what is easy in life?). There’s a research that says you need like 70-90k dollars per year and anything more is not necessary for living a fulfilled life. I want to get to that number as fast as possible.
Q3
At Q3 (third quarter) of last year I had a revelation. I was going to campus but apparently all the class for that day will be held online. I thought I was gonna kill some time by visiting a friend but I realized I had none. To be fair, everyone was busy but I wonder if it’s the weekend and it would still be the same. This prompted me to spend less time in my room sitting in front of the computer and try to leave the house. I maintained a multi month streak of trying to meet someone once a week. I’m so grateful that there are still people who want to be accompanied with me. I remember during the pandemic every two months or so I had to talk to someone because I was so lonely. To some extent I think, I can’t escape the loneliness, it will always be inside me but I can try to dampen its effects somewhat by trying to spend more of my time with others.
Now I understand that if I can’t do something, it’s because I lack the knowledge to do so. This is very in line with what David Deutsch has said. As long as what you’re trying to do does not break the law of physics, anything is possible. It might not be easy, it might take a long time, but it is possible. I also spent a lot more time driving last year, something that I really hated to do but now I’m even learning stick shift. I had to do it out of necessity and I can imagine in the future, in order to meet new people I had to go to a different city because it’s very hard to find people that are aligned with me, but I know it’s possible, I’ve seen a glimpse of what they looked like.
2024
2024 wasn’t that eventful nor was it so different from many of the years I’ve gone through. It is the first year of my twenties though, maybe that’s something. I also learned many other small things that I can’t mention here, because it would stretch this post to a hundred pages. It became very apparent that everything is up to me, I’m an adult now. I could genuinely ruin everything by getting addicted to certain vices and deliberately getting a bad grade. I could do all of that intentionally, in fact I know some of my friends who are doing that. The insane part is, I know why they’re doing it. I know why they gave up. Truth is, life is insanely unbearable and suffering is an inevitable part of life. Yet every single generation has people who chose to rebel against that, to push through no matter how difficult life could be.
You can imagine if someone grew up in a family where the adults are always fighting, in poverty and debt, in an environment where everyone didn’t even finish high school. If they have kids they’ll do the exact same thing their parents did to them. In that way, in less than a dozen generations everyone would be a victim of family abuse. Yet somehow that is not the case. Many, if not the majority of people are capable of wisdom. Of choosing a better life for their kids, no matter the amount of pain and regret that they happen to experience.
In life, we choose our regrets.
~ Christopher Hitchens
We indeed choose our regret. What would’ve happened if you had chosen a different major? What if you had gotten a different job? Where would you be if you had studied harder? In every decision of our life, there is an opportunity cost. It might not seem that way, but we don’t know what could’ve happened. We can choose to dwell on our past mistakes, we can be bed ridden with anxiety about the future or guilt about the past. But if we truly look at the nature of decision making, it is obvious that all path that we took has a price. So it is wrong to blame ourselves for what happened, or to blame anyone or anything. We can choose right now what we’re regretting and to learn from our mistakes. We should not be held accountable on arbitrary goals that were made in the past. Most of us don’t even know what we want. Most of what we want is not even our decision, it’s influenced by those around us.
We can indeed change these patterns. Stop blaming yourself. Stop ruminating. Stop thinking and just start doing. I’ll try to do more doing in 2025. We’ll see how it goes.