temporal landmarks

It’s been nearly eleven full months since I last wrote a blog post—looking back through the years that I’ve had this blog, it seems like this may in fact be the longest time in between posts I’ve ever had. What is somewhat terrifying is that this past year has gone by faster than any other year in my life—this gap in posts occupies a much smaller sense of time span in my mind than any other relevant period in my life. People have brought up the idea of “temporal landmarks,” significant moments in your memory, to help chunk up your life to create the sense that a lot happened in that period, given that your brain can recall a large quantity of things spread throughout that time. Given that I always feel so busy, I know that I have done a lot this past year, but why does it feel like the year passed me by so quickly? Perhaps the scariest realization of all is that looking into the medium-term future, I see fewer such temporal milestones, and it appears that life will continue to accelerate. Then, looking back, will I be as puzzled as I am now as to what happened to those years?

I’m hoping that a combination of starting to write logs again and being more intentional in creating meaningful memories will help amelioriate this in the future. But yet another interesting phenomenom that I’ve started to notice is that as I continue to experience more of life, things no longer become novel by definition, and fewer moments are notable from a marginal experience perspective. People often warn about hedonic treadmill in terms of scaling income and corresponding lifestyle creep, but there’s a bit of a general lifestyle happiness creep that gradually happens as the small things become slightly less exciting each time as the world becomes a bit more explored.

To avoid sounding like too much of a doomer, there are still several milestones to point back towards, and future moments I know to be right on the horizon! In April, my cohort and I officially finished our Early Career Trading education program—one of my favorite weekends thus far this week was spent hanging out with the whole group in a lakeside cabin in PA. In June, our summer interns came, and a few weeks later, my team was moved to a different floor, away from all the friends I had previously made at work. July 4th week, I went up to Canada with my parents for a fantastic week of fishing. In October, my team went through a reorg, which was anxiety-inducing in the moment, but a bright side was that I came out of the reshuffle having reduced my daily research responsibilities—I finally only had one job, and my hours reduced considerably. November came and I went to London (visited Europe for the first time!) for my birthday weekend and to watch my first ever League match, which ended up being one of the greatest worlds finals of all time—truly a blast, and I am looking forward to possibly watching finals again next year in Chengdu + making a large China trip out of it. I am just coming back from Thanksgiving week with my family (can’t believe it’s already over tbh), and a long trip to Japan/Taiwan is right around the corner during Christmas.

effort battery

Upon second thought, why this past year has gone by so quickly is perhaps easily explained. My weekdays are burned through due the sheer number of hours I spend at the office, and the time I spend back in my apartment is hardly quality (my weekday for several months was some cycle of work into League into sleep). My theory as to why I do this is because I’ve always had an intense propensity to procrastinate versus an inability to put down unfinished work. This manifested as expected back in college, where I would often fail to touch a problem set until the night it was due, when I would discover a burst of productivity and insight and complete the entire thing in a few hours in what could never be described by anything short of a miracle. I would eventually stretch this to extreme proportions, my procrastination tool of choice was often League, and by the time I arrived at self-studying for FINRA exams last year, I often found it nearly impossible to be study a single minute without a legitimate sense of being completely and utterly f*cked. I took the SIE, then the Series 57, and finally the Series 7 with all the same struggle with procrastination until the final hours preceding the exam and eventual miraculous success.

The way this manifests now in work is that my brain feels as though I am in midterm season all the time, with impossible deadlines demanding miracles in order to be hit every day—I correspondingly dug deep every day for the past year, developing a mental/physical stamina for work that I would’ve thought impossible prior to starting work. I think if someone had told the pre-work version of me that this is what I would become, he would’ve been far more concerned rather than impressed. The name of this blog was motivated by my desire over the years to combat my procrastinating tendencies and ultimately be more productive, but I’ve ironically ended up in a work environment where I never have to be concerned about not being productive enough.

This is not to say my procrastinating tendencies are not still in play. The way I view it, everyone has a limit when it comes to pushing themselves (both mentally and physically)—but this is hardly a binary limit, therefore demanding the existence of a “battery” that can be drained and recharged. In this analogy, pushing one’s limits would mean that one drains this battery in a session much more than typical, or even past a previously understood “max charge.” To me, this battery stores everything that requires effort, whether it be something hard (studying for several hours) to even the simple things (make social plans). My approach to work over the past year had essentially been to stay at the office until my battery was completely drained, and only then come back home to recharge. At that point, given that nothing is left in said battery, even the things that require the smallest bits of effort (e.g. reply to a text) that otherwise might even be fun become essentially impossible to will myself into doing. And in those moments, I turn to League, as simply sleeping each night is not enough to recharge my battery to work the next day. When this gets really rough, socializing on the weekend flips to being draining (extrovert vs introvert), and I will instead solo-vegetate the entire weekend to recover for the next week of work.

Earlier this year, I realized that I was burning through my battery faster than I could replenish it despite maxing out all my recharging methods (video games, resting the entire weekend), leading me to conclude that perhaps my only option is to reduce how hard I work. I’ve reduced my hours recently, coming down from my peak of 14 hours/day to a more sustainable 12 (I think an ideal would be something closer to 10), but the expected result of my battery recharging back to full has not yet materialized as I still feel quite tired—perhaps the only major change has been that I’ve exchanged two hours of work for one hour of League and one of sleep.

I’ve gone through enough phases in life where I vow to quit League that I know that realistically I may go back to the game at some point—right now, I do want to try taking a break from the game for a bit and see what else I can fill the time with. This is in the hopes that with a bit more “effort battery” left over each day, I can start trickling in some of the low-effort tasks back into my day to day: staying in touch with friends, working out more regularly, running errands, etc.. Writing like I am doing right now was essentially impossible prior to the week I just took off not from a time perspective, but rather due to not having any mental energy leftover to sit down, think through my thoughts, and present it in a digestible fashion.

I’m hoping that reclaiming certain “effortful” things will help chunk up each individual day into more than just work and correspoding recovery. There’s a long list of things I wanna try incorporating back into my life: working out regularly will be chief among those items (I am bullish on this helping me recharge day to day), with the second item being starting to write again. I’ve found my writing skills continue to deteriorate (like you don’t even know how hard it was for me to remember how to spell that “deteriorate”) much to my embarrassment, and start to blog again will theoretically slow that decay. I may swap over my blog posts to Substack just to make managing my mailing lists/readers more easily, but continue to crosspost on my own personal site just because I don’t feel like giving up on this website just quite yet. A PC build is on the books for a short-term hobby as well—I hope to share all this and more with you guys in hopefully a much shorter gap than this post ended up being!