End of year yap

Oh hey! Another year and I'm still here, after all!

This year has been a mix of many different things. Mostly work related, but some of it is pretty personal. Let's just say I've been trying to be my best self, but the path towards that has not been linear at all. It's been a meandering and confusing road that's led me to dread the future, feel disconnected, and feel extremely cynical towards humanity.

I've come to realise that with age, everything slows down. Life doesn't happen as fast anymore, but it goes by quicker than ever. Over the past year, I’ve spent more than 1,700 hours on work that will likely be gone by next year. I won't mention Sisyphus, but web dev has a way of making effort feel temporary. Projects turn over quickly, lifespans are short, and hundreds of hours dissolve into something barely remembered - a blip on the Wayback Machine, if anything remains at all.

Don't get me wrong - I am grateful that I can work on things that I'm absolutely passionate about. I love the web and all the opportunities and creativity I can have when creating things with this technology. It's just the nature of web dev that keeps everything so intangible, that I wish there was something else that I could do to actually leave something behind that matters. You know, contributing to society, the future, to a generation beyond us.

Maybe I'm in my depression era, and maybe I'm just having a midlife crisis. I guess I'm pretty much that age now, so it fits. My younger self would have envied the position I'm in right now. I'm aware of that. I'm not directly complaining about my life in general. Currently, I'm in somewhat of a privileged position in life, and it leaves me with the opportunity to think about what direction I want to head in with the rest of my life.

I'm happy to say that I've been expanding my experiences with hosting more meetups and doing more with photography. Things I promised myself to be doing more of! And it's been really fun. I do believe something is still missing. And as with most things in life, it's not about the content. It's about the execution, or let's say the shape. It's the framing or mould. The expression that characterises something or a moment. The content can assume many shapes and present itself in many ways. I think I have a very romanticised view of life, and it's how I measure my life quality. With life's fleeting nature, I've focused on things that I'm passionate about. I do not take up something and leave it to the side when I've had my fill or when my curiosity has been sated. When I invest in something, I tend to make it part of my life. It congeals and becomes one with my personality. I make it a responsibility to nurture that part of me, the same way I take care of my body. It becomes me.

Trying to put into words what I feel has been a struggle. I believe that I used to be better at it. My theory is that I've lost a bit of my self-expression because I mostly use the English language nowadays. I've grown up bilingual, but it's been Dutch and Arabic for most of my childhood and my young adulthood. My preference for expressing myself on paper has always been a bit more philosophical, and that requires me to push the boundaries of my vocabulary. I guess you can see this post as an attempt towards getting better at that. And maybe that has been my life goal all along. To become the person that would make my younger self proud.