🧠 Ian's Public Journal

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2024-05-02

May 02, 202410 min read

2024-05-02 | 12:31:51 PM

Hello there. I’m suffering from my third gout flareup in ≈4 weeks. It sucks. But here I am sucking it up, like everyone else. I’ve been spending quite a bit of my time on r/gout recently, just so I could feel like I’m at least not alone in my struggles.

It’s been a heavy couple of weeks. I’d been absent on important F2F meetings, both at work and at university. In university, I’ve been absent for two weeks of my classes already. It’s a shitty time. In all honesty, I’d rather not write this shit anymore, but it’s one of the few things that I’m genuinely looking forward to doing. In this state (as in mental state), I’ve just been going through the motions. The pain in my foot, the pain in my lower-left abdomen, the heat in the Philippines, my dirty room, my stagnant career, and everything else.

Part of me feels like it’s wrong that I’m even sharing my condition people, including some very specific people (which I’d rather not disclose, as this is really sensitive information). It feels almost… wrong. It’s almost as if a huge part of me is saying, “As if they care?”

I know that my sickness is just some hindrance achieving the next business goal, whatever KPI that may be. And I don’t feel bad about that. As a matter of fact, I kind of accepted it already, that I’m just some sort of cog in the system. Easily replaceable. It’s generally annoying that I feel almost desensitized from my reality because I have to think about the reality of something else.

I’d read about this somewhere. This sense of alienation in a world where you’re pretty much part of what reinforces the very web of capitalism, even if you don’t want to. In a sense, I’m forced to comply. As a libertarian, that shit rings a bell so loud I want to quit my job on the spot, right here, right now. But the unfortunate reality is I have bills to pay, I have responsibilities to attend to, and it just isn’t a good, practical idea to quit my job at the moment, despite the countless reasons I have to support the opposite.

My health is declining, the prices of goods in the Philippines is constantly rising whilst my pay remains the same, my bills keep getting higher due to my increasing need in terms of my health, and a bunch more. I can’t even buy my prescription glasses anymore, for fuck’s sake, even when I technically could. Just because spending something for myself feels almost… bad. Like I shouldn’t do that, because there are more important matters at hand, like the upcoming electricity bill.

I find it a tad comical that, whenever I have the urge to buy something I want, I compare them with the things I constantly need to pay… and if what I want is the same price as something I need, I immediately wouldn’t have the urge to buy it anymore. Like the experience isn’t the same at all. There’s an overwhelming level of guilt. It kills the joy of working hard so I could buy something I want.

It becomes, “I choose to buy this stupid thing, instead of what I need.”

2024-05-02 | 06:38:27 PM

I’m tired. Today’s been a really rough day. I could go on about how bad everything went but at least I’m still here trying to write something (which is at least something positive, in and of itself). I’ve been scouring the internet trying to find what next thing I could do. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time reading stuff on r/learnprogramming and r/nosurf, trying to figure out whether it even is realistic that I would want to learn something new. I already don’t have that much time managing my own health and doing the stuff that I find generally fun, and yet I still am actively trying to find something new to do. This, coupled with the fact that I’m again, actively looking for another job to sustain my finances — it’s not a good combination at all.

When I think of it, as in take a pause and feel, in my body, at the moment, I could sense that I’m intensely fucking overwhelmed.

LMAO sorry — I don’t even know what to make of this anymore. All I’m saying is I have waaaaay too much stuff to do, and the stress is consuming me. In a quick glance, most of them’s “check this out”, “look at this”, “find out how”, like some sort of stupid list of advertisements that all vie for my attention. Should I delete them? Probably not. At least I think I shouldn’t at this point, since that will be a rash, impulsive decision. But at the same time, after reading about what minimalism is, I’m extremely tempted to say, “Fuck it!” And remove everything.

2024-05-02 | 07:46:33 PM

I’m thinking of a way to incorporate some sort of daily log to track my learnings in the various interests that I have. See the whole bunch of interests I’ve got going on over at _READ-ME-FIRST? I feel like I should create like a log of the things I’d learned in each of those, just so I wouldn’t forget anything.

Look, I’m a huge advocate of writing things down — down to the smallest of the smallest of the smallest detail you could ever think, especially when it’s regarding a niche topic. The problem with documentations that pertain to very particular topics is that they often vanish in the face of pop. Pop, in this sense, is defined as in popular culture. In the modern world, almost everyone consumes the same content.

It’s never so much becoming a surprise anymore when someone mentions a viral content, and someone says:

I’ve already seen that!

Yeah, no shit, man. Most of you us are chronically online! It’s almost like we’re governed by the algorithms around us. Our advertisements, our #fyp and other feeds and whatnot — it feels as though the more I move away from them, the more I realize just how fucked up everything is at the moment. The very concept of a viral video resonating to billions of people is so bothersome it makes me want to isolate myself from the entire internet. But who am I kidding? This thing alone, as in this website that I made for myself, is a personal weapon I’m using to combat being brainwashed by these tech giants.

But is it really effective? I don’t know. At this point, I really do not know. Part of me wishes I just didn’t encounter social media at all — and that’s the truth.

The internet is a place filled with gems, but also filled with oozing, hot, stinky, rotting garbage. Look, I found this Reddit post a while ago, with which I resonated:

Isn’t it kind of comforting somehow and creepy that this sounds like something I would’ve written? I mean half of the entire premise of my writing about quitting social media is this! The other half is something concerning my undergraduate thesis.

I could feel OP’s pain when they said their main reason for deleting Instagram was because it seemed like a fucking diary app.

Everyone keeps posting stuff (mostly highlight reels of their lives), most of which I didn’t ask for. Well, I kinda did when I followed them. But every time I’m there my entire mood’s just like, “Nope, didn’t ask.” Not in a negative way but more in a “You’re not really like that, are you?” Way.

And holy shit the level of disconnection that I’d felt when I messaged someone and they wouldn’t reply, or just leave me on seen and completely ignore my messages — it made me feel as if everything was fucking fake. Like I couldn’t even build genuine relationships anymore, unless I was some part of a social media-active group that hung out at a local bar or some shit.

Isn’t most of what we’re supposed to be doing is to talk, connect, and socialize?

And when OP said, “I also realized I don’t need to know about what others are doing all the time, especially people I don’t talk to daily or even at all in day-to-day life”, I felt that shit. I felt it like an annoying little itch in my soul has finally been scratched. I felt noticed.

And yeah, if you’re ever wondering why I even talked about messaging people, it’s because I actively try to reach out to people with whom I want to talk to, but then it came to a point when I’d just felt more unrecognized than ever. It was like I was talking to words on a screen that told me, “You’re not worthy enough to deserve my attention.”

Sure, I had a few friends here and there that would message me when I said I wanted someone to talk to, but the point remains: It’s hard to build strong relationships online, especially without genuine interactions.

In a world where building actual relationships require effort, it’s much easier to flop, belly-down on the sofa and decide not to talk to anyone anymore, especially when there are more stimulating stuff to do, like scroll YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels.

Unfortunately, if one can’t open up enough to let the other person in, there just wouldn’t be much to connect between the two, and that’s just the gist of it. And I understand it’s hard to make friends with someone, especially if it only revolves around a sort of one-sided energy. More often than not, it’s easier to just give up trying to befriend someone when they seem aloof (I believe that, more often than not, that’s a false image painted by our insecure minds). BUT I’d like to think of it more like this:

Quotes from The School of Life:

A quote from The School of Life

It is sad enough when two people dislike each other. It is even sadder when two people fail to connect because both parties defensively but falsely guess that the other doesn’t like them – and yet, out of low self-worth, takes no risk whatever to alter the situation. We should stop worrying quite so much whether or not people like us, and make that far more interesting and socially useful move: concentrate on showing that we like them.

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And this:

Another quote from The School of Life

We have to realize that whether or not the other person likes us is going to depend on what we do, not – mystically – what we by nature ‘are’, and that we have the agency to do rather a lot of things.

Link to original

You ever notice how someone feels inauthentic? Like something about them’s not right? You could almost smell that shit. It’s so strong, like what you could see in people who try to sell their courses or endlessly drive affiliate links on social media. I’m talking about Twitter. I say this because I was once part of this online circle called “Money Twitter”, where basically everything is all about gaining fabricated engagement so Twitter’s (or now X’s) algorithm pushed your accounts to more users, so you could gain higher traffic to see your course. It was good at first — my account grew in what seemed to be an “organic” way.

However, something felt very, very fucking wrong. I knew I wasn’t being genuine, and I didn’t want to be a guy who constantly markets some product all the time. I get that that’s an appealing thing to people, and it surely is appealing because there are tons of financial benefits to running an online business (these Money Twitter people, for example, usually have digital courses and/or paid mentorship links in their bio). I’d heard a lot of success stories here and there, and there definitely could be value in marketing your stuff online. However, something about it’s really off. For me, at least.

2024-05-03 | 12:03:12 AM

This one’s already for the following day, but I’d like to put it here since I’m writing in the context of the same day, as in 2024-05-02, not tomorrow.

I’d just like to quickly append this case study for what I call a Timeless note:

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