121 karma · joined April 4, 2019
The Internet has generated in me an habit of information hoarding. At the beginning I would bookmark useful information and then take notes on paper of the useful things; with the passing of time distraction has started to creep in: more and more useless information, more and more FOMO.
2. Omnipresence of tech and privacy concerns
An increasing number of actions require emails to get done, this rises privacy concerns. When I was 14 enrolling in high-school meant filling a form in pen and paper and bring it to the administrative office. 11 years later, my sister needed an email and personal information on the net. I really don't like it.
3. Affliction due to envy
I haven't used social media since I was 19 but HN and reddit are not really better: there are a lot of thing that I just wish I could forget and fill me with envy that I would have never felt if I had never read about that particular thing. It is obviously irrational being envious of something that you didn't event wanted in the first place, but the irrationality of that feeling do not make it less real and painful. Sometimes I do a 30 day diet and I do not visit HN or reddit, but the feelings never really go away.
4. Ephemerality
I still have some books passed by my great-grandmother belonging to my great-grandfather during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. I still have all my books from middle- and high-school. These required passive maintenance: just put them on the shelves far from fire and done. On the other hand I've lost entire years of data (photos, books, notes) during a single incident that rendered my physical back-ups useless.
2. I would have stopped comparing myself to others since the first year of high school: I was almost always top of my class but the constant comparisons and fear to be a "loser" even for a single score have greatly contributed to my extremely deep depression; I can't find joy in my accomplishment: it doesn't matter how good I am.
3. I would have tried to be more physically attractive both for a health and social reason: I would have dropped all the b*it about interior beauty and focusing on having a good looking package to pass the initial first-impression, instinctive reaction.
4. I wouldn't have thought much about the future and how much I need to do everything right or else. It turns out that I do not have and will never have all the information to do the right choice in every given context and most of the good and the bad in life are happenstances, luck: our right choices are a nice narrative that we tell ourselves to make sense of the mess that it is existence.
5. I would have stayed a bookworm even if it was not cool: the cool kids turned out to be not so cool after all.
6. I would have started watching more anime in high school instead of being snobbish about it.
7. I would have tried to develop much more my interpersonal skills with people I was really interested about instead of the above-mentioned cool kids.
8. I would have dropped all the lofty multi-year goals and expectation and focused on small goals (at most 6-12 months-long goals) and create sustainable habits on the day to day mundane grind so that, when the realization that the goals were impossible would have hit, I would have been sustained by a healthy lifestyle instead of my big mess of a so-called life.
Why is this wrong? Maybe I am abnormal but for me a job is just a method to receive money. It is the case that my passions are unpractical and not economically profitable, so I work on the part that I can tolerate and leave the business part to people more inclined to do well in that part. It seems like the struggle of entrepreneurship is interpreted morally, while it really doesn't have a moral dimension at all.