It feels like just yesterday I wrote the last post on this blog. This last month has been a blur, which makes sense because almost every week had a consistent rhythm. But I realized that this isn’t the consistent rhythm I want, honestly I don’t even want to carry this over into the next month. How did so much time go by before I realized this?
Let’s turn back to trusty song lyrics
Life goin’ fast, but we kids and we thinkin' it'll be that way forever, so we waste time
Ignoring the perhaps harsh tone of using this lyric as a metaphor, I think people often fall into this form of complacency in life. Falling into a narrow vision of what your future will look like makes you lose the bigger picture and what you’re actually working towards. A good example of this is going into Quant.
When a coworker of mine was in college, he told me that almost everyone he knew had the goal of getting a job as a Quant researcher. They made lots of money and actively worked on interesting problems— what else could you want? Aspiring for these roles was common in Olympiad communities a while ago, and when everyone around you that you respect has the same short term goal, it's hard to see how that fits into your long term goals.
Nowadays, many Olympiad people I know want to work in big AI labs for similar reasons, but personally, AI feels a lot different, and my reasons for this could be a whole separate blog post. But, I think some people might be following this too blindly. I heard someone get asked why they’re interested in AI, and their answer of “it’s natural to be interested in AI these days” somehow felt unsatisfying.
The high school ‘grindset’ is another example of this. It’s pretty obvious why getting into a good school matters, but some people that are in really deep that they haven’t dimensionalized this idea. They have a hard time associating how things they are doing in the short term will help them with their future.
And I think this entire idea of life going too fast boils down to how much control you have over outcomes in your life. The lyric right after is:
Roamin’ the hood as a kid seem big, yeah, 'cause we never went across the state line.
Oftentimes, the decisions you can make are restricted to a small field of possibilities. But there are other times when you think about the broader picture, likely because you realize that you can actually influence it. And this realization gives you more control.
But with more power comes more responsibility. You can’t hide behind things being ‘out of your control.’ You can’t say you weren’t old enough, or that you weren’t given the right resources. And the thing I’m hiding from here is the reality that I can actually do anything, and the responsibility that comes with failing to do something.
It’s both liberating and confining to realize you have all this control of long term goals in your life, and I guess we’ll see what I do with it in August.
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