First post

I hope there still exist people that find blogs cool in 2026. It feels good to step away from the brainrot and do something that requires a bit more patience and focus. I'm noticing I have a problem with scrolling—its such a normal default behavior to fall back into, but doing it for long periods of time is basically equivalent to blacking out. How many of the reels that I've seen over the last couple days do I remember? If you asked me to name what I have gained from watching reels, what content I remember or content that was meaningful to me, my mind draws a blank. So many people in my generation and younger are starting to be completely absorbed into their phones and devices. The real world coexists side by side with the virtual world, though the virtual continually demands more of our attention share. For most people the usage pattern is almost always to read only, never create. Its hard to pinpoint the last time I made a painting or artwork or created something new. There's a certain point where I stopped making things and working on art—writing essays, taking sketch classes, doing piano lessons. It's becoming important to me to create something, to leave my mark and digital footprint somewhere out there in the ether.

I had written in my journal intermittently all the way from elementary school until now. Writing my thoughts down gave me a way to express a lot of things that I couldn't tell to other people, or even understand myself better as I put specific words to my ideas. I recently flipped back through some entries which I wrote in middle school. I had so many entries about the things I was excited for, magic the gathering tournaments, hang outs with friends, being worried but excited for orchestra concerts. I had a bit of a ship of Theseus moment: though I’m technically the same person and that was me at one point, it feels like a completely different brain and body, almost like those things were put there in a long forgotten dream. Reading back the entries from when I was younger, I used to have so much more excitement for the mundane. Everything was still interesting because it was new and fresh. It was important to my younger self to note things like seeing a movie for the first time or if I started learning a new piano piece. There was always a next exciting thing, something to learn, something to work on. I was convinced that the future would be ever greater than the present. Now I find myself occasionally wondering if the good old days have already passed, if the best years of my life are already in the rear view.

It’s a bit deeper than realizing I never became an astronaut or whatever. Fundamentally it’s a shift in optimism, in the belief that things will only get better as we keep living on. I need to remember that growing older and settling into working life is not the end, but the beginning of my life. It seems easy lately to lose that feeling at times and question my purpose. I go to my 9-6 job, hit the gym, eat dinner, hang out and grab beers my friends on the weekends, get a couple of travels in while I can, and in the blink of an eye a year and a half has passed. Rinse and repeat till I'm 65. I can understand why my parents say that time sneaks up on you—its easy to picture that without any sort of change I'll soon have spent my whole life living exactly as I do now, with no momentum to push me out of my current path.

Time is truly the most precious resource we all have. Whether you’re a normal person or literally Elon Musk, we all only have 24 hours in a day. The way that you choose to spend those hours determines how you'll live out your life. There is a very finite cap to your ability, attention span, and energy you can give to others. Unfortunately, we can’t all be good at everything.

As a perennial overachiever, it’s hard to accept. I can’t become a gardener and a potter and a pianist and have an amazing social life and do great at my job and do side projects while also getting shredded and making delicious meals every day. Time spent on one activity is time that you can't spend on another. I’ve started to realize that I should work on things more in seasons. If I want to be a writer, I should narrow my focus on writing new content. If I want to get stronger in the gym, I should make a push to increase weights for the month. My life goals can’t be taken down all in one shot, I need some time for things to mature and settle in before moving on to the next plateau. Some hobbies might even take a lifetime to master, and that’s okay.

When I started playing through my old Chopin nocturnes from high school, I remembered how my goal use to be to learn the whole book. I had pictured myself as an old man playing through those pieces, how sick it would be to come back to those same songs I had started on as a kid. I want to keep that idea alive, the idea that my young self is still looking out for 80 year old me, still willing to try new things and put myself out there. I have so many more things to explore and create, so many new memories and adventures ahead of me still. My life is not yet set in stone, and I'm determined to make the peak of my life ahead rather than behind. This blog is another experiment, another attempt to spice up my life. If you've made it this far, I'm glad you're along with me on this journey.