for tomorrow

It’s crazy to say, but I feel like I’m running out of time in the second semester of my senior year. Between school and work almost every day, I’m left with far less time to pursue side quests or hang out with my friends than I had planned for. Don’t get me wrong—working is super fun—but the scarcity of time has never felt more real to me. And this is surprising to me. I used to feel like saying you have “no time” was just an excuse that means you didn’t care enough about something, which it probably is. If I really cared, I would’ve spent an extra hour on that project instead of listening to music. And most of the time, I trust myself to make this value judgement correctly. But when I’m tired, the bar for motivation rises exponentially, and something I could’ve done a few hours ago is almost impossible to do now. I almost always have enough time, just not enough motivation. The most obvious solution to this is removing “agentic” choices from these things, partially outsourcing this m...

Outside of playing video games, most of what I did in middle school was write code and do competition math. And I was happy in this reality. But as I entered high school, I looked at the skills I had, and regretted not having many outside the technical world. I couldn’t play an instrument, and could barely name a few fun facts about myself during the first day of school introductions. So I asked myself why. Well, I thought it was because I was never forced to do anything for most of my life , so I just stuck to those technical-esq things. And I did feel slightly bad about it, but it simultaneously felt out of my control. I took that feeling of inadequacy, a gap between the person I was and wanted to be, and attributed it to something that wasn’t me. This is the epitome of cope. Cope, fundamentally, is the way that we keep living with ourselves, and it's not necessarily bad. But, sometimes, cope becomes a fancy way of feeling sorry for yourself. I don’t mean to demeaning or pessimis...