Crystallizing is Killing You

My year started with the single most life-changing event that I've experienced so far. A 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat. I had lots of experience with meditation before this, having started when I was 14, but everything I knew was self taught and my practice was intermittent. I learned a ton about myself and about my life during and after the retreat through meditation, and it prompted me to quit my job and move to the other side of the world.

I had a pretty good job before. Maybe perfect. I was working for and with people that I really liked, I was working on problems that I thought were interesting and challenging, I got to work from home every day, and the money was more than enough to support my lifestyle.

I was happy, but I wasn't satisfied.

It took another 2 months after I got back from the retreat to fully come to the decision to quit my job and leave the US. The reasons I decided to leave are pretty numerous and complex, but I think it basically boils down to wanting a change. I felt like I had crystallized. Like my routines and my life were frozen in place. Like I was doing the same thing all day every day. I could see straight down the barrel of the next decade of monotony, and I didn't like it. So I left.

Decrystallizing

The original plan was to backpack until I ran out of money. I would start in the north of Vietnam, then zig-zag my away across Southeast Asia, hitting every country I could on the mainland all the way down to Singapore, where I would hop on a plane and work my way back East to see my family in the US, stopping in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan along the way. And so I set off, taking with me just the absolute bare essentials that I thought I would need (and planning to buy a few things when I landed).

Those first few days were a bit overwhelming for a lot of reasons. I was alone (and lonely), I was staying in a super low-budget party hostel (not my vibe), the weather was pretty gnarly (hot and humid), and the old quarter of Hanoi is a cacophony. But I adapted pretty quickly, and once I became comfortable I started to love it.

I spent most of my time doing to common touristy things that foreigners do in the North. Ha Giang Loop, Ninh Binh, Ha Long Bay, and tours of Hanoi. After the initial anxiety of being alone on the other side of the world began to fade I started to become more comfortable with the uncertainty of every moment, and realized that I was starting to decrystallize. There was no more routine. There was no more expectation for tomorrow. And what once felt like this big adventurous leap into the unknown was now just life.

The experience was both refreshing and eye-opening. The stark contrast between the way I was living my life before I left the US and the way I was living my life while I was traveling re-shaped my view on what I wanted out of life and how I should go about achieving it.

The main lesson from this experience was to avoid crystallizing at all costs, because it will inevitably lead me down a path of dissatisfaction and mediocrity, putting me right back in the place I was at the beginning of this year. I believe that the routines that we settle into and the systems of comfort and pleasure we build around ourselves fundamentally make us risk averse and unambitious because we begin to value maintaining our comfort and happiness in the short term over crafting a life which is meaningful and satisfactory in the long term. Scared money don't make money.

Living a life unobserved is the fastest way to get absolutely nowhere. The point of avoiding comfort and routine is to break out of the mental habit patterns that we've built up over our entire lives, because those patterns will only lead you to exactly where you're going. And exactly where you're going is probably on the couch in front of the TV.

Anyways, if you see this post and you've read this far, just know that:

1. I'm fucking astounded. Was this really that interesting? Am I really that interesting?
2. This isn't really representative of the overarching content I want to post on this site. I'm really just putting it in here as a placeholder that has some amount of possibly valuable content. This blog is primarily a tool for me to organize and process some of my thoughts in a way that I otherwise wouldn't if I didn't write them in an extended format. In the future, I suspect (and hope) that I'll take on more technical subjects here related to my work, which is primarily AI optimization and cost reduction.