It’s 3 AM local time at my hotel in Rabat, and I am reminded of the pleasures of solitude, how beautiful it is to count on yourself to get things you want, and how easy it is to fall into the trap of thinking things are there because it would have been convenient for you.
Whenever I travel with my parents, I am reminded of how much freedom I have gained since I have left high school and how much glamorous my life has been since then. I don’t enjoy coming home very much, and for a long time, I’ve always had trouble pinpointing why. I develop of a sense of claustrophobia, even when I am outside. My furniture is spaced too closely together, and there is an overall lack of intention and charm in my living spaces. It is wild, but my apartments in SF and New York were larger than my living spaces in my childhood house. In addition, since I furnished every detail myself, since I don’t buy from sales, everything is extremely precise and intentional. I arranged my room given effectively unlimited resources, and it is a product of my intention, which is the opposite how much room is like at home — inherited.
I’m a weird dilemma where I want to go on dates, but I don’t like being seen around people who are less attractive than me. If I was attracted to people who want to go on dates with me, this wouldn’t be a problem.
I like postcards because they allow me to reevaluate who I want in my life. I could either choose to send them a postcard, and put them on the list of people I wish to keep a regular correspondence, or I could drop them from my life, and write them out of my life.
People change their minds all the time, and it is very hard to consistently count on people to do things except when you pay them to do so. I have very good follow-through, so sometimes it is hard for me to understand how some people have bad follow-through. I was thinking the other day about how things get done in the absence of economic incentive. Specifically, I watching a cleaner cleaning a unfrequented surface on a table, wondering what drives them to get every spec of dust off the table when it wouldn’t be noticeable if the table was 90% clean vs. 80% clean. They would have been paid the same regardless, so the incremental effort wasn’t based on economics. I realized the answer was pride.
I feel like there is is less pride now than there was before. Maybe it is just the people I surround myself with, but I feel like people are more motivated a lot more by the superficial and self-interested parts of their personality. There is less pride in one’s work, and people just do what they want to do in a given moment, which is different from the last and will be different from the next.
shades of gwei 