2009 year of crisis

The year in general

2009 is the year of crisis. I wrote this post at the peak of the collapse. You can tell from the way I wrote that I was in despair, and that something is broken inside. Now that I am looking back with hindsight, I understand it for the moment that it is. A make or break point in my life where I experienced the complete acceptance that my life up until this point has been worthless.

Growth

Ironically as I am sitting here typing this, I feel more alive than ever. The cause of my despair has gone and passed, in its stead, only I remained. Perhaps I am more affected because I have everything that defined me on the hook. A man cannot go through the complete destruction and experience the full recovery from his own decisions without breaking and changing. Reading my posts at the beginning of the year feels so alien. There are times that I doubt I wrote those eloquent words, times I can’t understand how my thoughts can be so different and times when I thought that I was emotionally immature. All this change in just one year. I have grown more emotionally this year, than any other year in my life.

Other people have mentioned this to me. That as they step into their 30’s, a sudden sense of clarity begins overtaking them. It feels as if though their whole life is channeling them towards where they are at the moment, at the age of 30. I will be 30 next year and indeed I am sensing this foreboding elation.

I am going to have a quarter life crisis and I am going to come out feeling at peace with where I am in the world.

At the moment, there is some sort of clarity and some sort of confusion. Clarity in the way that I know what is the right thing to do with the confidence in my own gut feeling on what the right thing is. A good analogy on this for example can be explained by parties. Before this point in life, I’d try to go to all of them in fear of missing out that one opportunity meeting or miss out on the chatter afterward. What’s changed nowadays is that I listen to my own feelings to decide whether or not I’d go to something. Because if I want to enjoy something, my subconscious will have to first believe I will enjoy it. Plus it somehow always worked. When I have a foreboding feeling about certain events, what I suspected will be unpleasant always turn out to be true. So it has happened enough time that I decided I will have more chance of fun by blinding following this illogical logic. If it works, do it.

I am a lot kinder to people now. Not as much as I wanted, but I am trying hard. For those of you unfamiliar with Asian culture, we are a pretty blunt bunch. The reason, in my point of view is pretty simple. The language itself is very blunt. For example, we don’t have several different “politically correct” ways of saying “fat”. There’s no chubby, heavy boned or obese. If you are fat, you are fat. We either call you fat lady or fat man. To describe someone with any other term would be…. well weird. As if describing drinking Pepsi by saying: “swallowing the Pepsi liquid.” That and the weird discussions I am used to have with some of my closer friends make my remarks pretty ruthless.

I am not sure if I want to change this behavior because merciless in my judgment is essential for determining a person’s character as well as allowing me to navigate the world of finances safely. I am hoping that as life progresses and as I climb the ladder of life, I can afford to be less “nice” than I am required by the social norm. I also wish to meet more people who are wicked enough to see the funny side of my dark humor and retort back with something equally outrageous. For now, for the sake of increasing my social circles, I’ll watch my tongue, but don’t expect me to be anything else but myself when I am high with joy.

Major Events

There aren’t many major events. The year is just one big problem that affects everyone and everything. A year of fear, insecurity and anxiety. The year of financial crisis. I didn’t have much time to do anything else, but manage the crisis. Or scrambling everything I have to gain the skill to manage the crisis.

Business

Has been very slow. Everyone is super nice to me, I don’t know why. Maybe because I got more time to service them now that companies are falling like ducks in a hunt.

Web Site

The amount of visitors decreased. I believe a 4 month lull in updates caused many of my readers to stop reading. I also moved from writing about what I think my visitors wants to read back to writing about events that I am involved in. Surprisingly, the bandwidth used doubled from last year while unique visitor count halved. Most of the time, I have no idea what these data is trying to tell me. The feeling though is that my readers are transitioning to one hit wonders from search to people I actually know that comes back time after time. I am considering removing Triphasic Sleep, my most popular post so that I can focus myself on the type of readers I want.

The most popular post: Still Triphasic Sleep. I am beginning to see a pattern now. Around the end of every year, some university student doing research on sleep would land on my site. They’d read over everything about the research, embark on some data gathering and come out with some type of sleep theory next year or blogged about their own sleep deprivation experiment. All without quoting the original content. Every I see any of them say something positive about living life this way I smirk with glee, because I know that they are just bullshitting when they forget to mention the fact that your eyes would hurt so much that you eventually have to go back to sleeping 8 hours a day.

The most controversial post

None. I have stopped writing controversial stuff now that more and more of my business life have access to this. Maybe one day, when certain thing is right, I’ll get back to writing offending posts.

Materials

Acquired

• None

Sold

• Freezer: $50

Finances

You can’t remain the same person after losing everything, then gaining it back and tripling it.

Memories of the ultimate despair still lingers in my mind. The wound it caused, covered by crack cocaine giving me a short lived high. The two opposite state of mind literally occurred within weeks of each other and I get to see myself clearly at the two opposite extremes of my possible personality. Somewhere in between is where I currently settled for.

It was interesting how much money (a way to measure success) affected my perceived authority over others. While nothing has actually happened in the real relationship with those I know. I did notice that some, submit to the authoritative personality automatically while others revolted against it. The money itself for me has little meaning, it’s more the fact of being right that affected my personality the most. That I took the hardest decision because I believe in something while everyone else was scared shitless boosted my confidence to a level I previously didn’t think I could reach. Nowadays, I speak about finances with the utmost conviction in what I say because I apply them in real life and I have been right for 4 years now. At least, right enough to be constantly in the green except a brief 3 months of maximum pain.

The new found freedom comes with a price. I now have to reevaluate certain things that I had assumed about life as money becomes more and more irrelevant. I still live frugally as if I am a student on the verge of being broke, but that is done more out of habit now than because I have to. And because I now have a new subroutine in my mind that constantly evaluate the allocation of capital (in this case, time) versus the reward, it is more and more obvious that a lot of my old lifestyle is not worth the amount of time I allocated to it unless it is for my own enjoyment.

As such, my spending have increased, but still way below 50% of my income. But already, life has been awesome. I cannot fathom what life would be like, if I were to spend every dime I earn and planned on working my whole life. At three times my current spending, it won’t take long to finish buying every gadget I want or take all the trips I’ve planned. Yes, money is evil, but it sure as hell speed up a lot of the things in life. For me, I want more money so I can achieve more, without having to grind and muddle through stages of projects where I need to raise capital. This year, I finally understand what money is and No, understanding it does not mean I am Scrooge and want to rip off everyone I met as much as some would like to believe so. It is a permanent perplexing ideal that I have been puzzle over.

Why do people associate money with the evils of the world?

Projects

Primary goals:

• 6 packs stomach (Still nope)
• Bench press 160 lbs (Done)
  
• Finish my first flash game (Looooong way to finish line)
  
• Finish organizing all digital data (Nope)
  
• Write Zania (Nope)
  

Secondary goals:

• Finish home network (Done)
  
• Learn to pick generic locks (Couldn’t pick anything)
  
• Finish furnishing my condo (Done)
  
• Research and create 10 secret dishes that I can cook (8 now)
  
• Visit Kush in California (Nope)
  

Conclusions

The amount of growth I experienced this year is exponential. I think I have even started entertaining the thought of getting old. One thing is for sure though. I am more at ease with being an adult than I was before. In fact, being an irresponsible youth with a bone to pick with authority is no longer in my dictionary. I piss some people off, but I am ok with that now because I am no longer forcing myself to be liked by everyone. As a result, I attracted others to join my circle.

The most important fact I realized as I step into my would be quarter life crisis is that I will have to realign my life in the direction that is most beneficial to me. I can no longer learn and adapt my way through life and will need all the advantages I can leverage from here on. Sun Tze’s art of war says: positioning is half the battle. There is no benefit in waiting for your enemies to completely cross the river before attacking. Who will be there to sing about your honor if you lost and get killed in the process. Take all the advantage you can, scheme and fight all the fight you should. Then benefit those who matters in your life.