20 → 22
So 2 years ago, one of my friends were looking for a job and he was 22 at that time. He was/is a good programmer guy and had a lot of projects under his name. He was struggling to get a job he liked and I asked him a question.
“Dude you are a contributor to the Fedora Kernal, how hard can getting the job be?”
To which he replied
“That was 20 year old me. I’m not 20 anymore”
Little did I know that this answer will come to haunt me 2 years later.
When I was 20, I used to be the guy who thinks of “how can I write something that will solve this given problem” and I would have a rough idea on how to build a solution to that. It was not a well thought out product or something of extreme value but it felt great when I could think of something like that and get motivated to work on it. I used to spend almost all my weekend attending hackathons, hacking on stuff I found interesting and fun.
I can safely say I used to be a Hacker.
Am I a hacker now? I’m not sure. Sometimes I get this sudden boost in motivation to work on something so trivial or something more fun just to make 5 mins of my time less manual. But that’s just programmer vibes I guess, a lot of “Not Invented Here” syndrome.
My life has been one hack on top of another. Winging things all the time, not completing enough(Only things I’ve completed end to end is School and some old computer games) just leaving things off once it serves my purpose. It’s a pretty lazy trait and I fully accept me being lazy. But being lazy has it’s perks of getting to work on something that makes your life less mediocre.
But thinking on mediocrity on life, life used to be less mediocre back when I was 20. Sitting home(due to covid), having a deluge of ideas, not thinking much into the future and getting anxious, pondering on philosophical pointless questions. But being 22, guess the only thing still going on from 2 years ago is sitting at home(remotly working), everything else has changed. Zero original ideas, zero creativity, zero things to do for fun and more mediocre. Maybe I’m just trying to hold on to my childish self. If I get to an option to choose to relive my childhood vs to fast forward to my mid-life situation, I’ll choose my childhood any day any time and relive it all again to reach this age again and wing it again. Life was simpler then(like a 50 year old would say). Funnily(?) enough I can’t write my heart out anymore, even reading my blogs from 2 years ago makes my current self feel like what happened? and neither can I read much more books. I mean these two must be correlated but still not living upto that 20 year old self. Maybe from my current perpective, life peaked when I was 20 and I’m still struggling to match what I achieved when I was 20.
Maybe my GitHub green dots might give you an idea on what changed
I’m just speculating on all the above, it’s fun to have these weird thought experiments as long as it doesn’t kill a cat or destroy a ship.
But yeah, being 22 hasn’t been easy to wing. Maybe mediocrity is part of being an Adult(Am I an adult?). Maybe it’s becoming all the things I never dreamt of becoming but alas! I’ve become all those. I’ve become a bore of a person, less interesting. I find my 20 year old self a hella lot interesting and lot more curious and a lot more hacker vibes and zero fucks to give. Now it’s too many “fucks to give” to handle.
I’m sorry to that 20 year self, I’m sorry that I ended up less than you.
“The child is gone, The dream is gone
I have become comfortably numb”
- Comfortably Numb, The Wall,Pink Floyd