past me would laugh at present me’s woes

a bachelor’s from MIT? a doctorate in CS? a whole bathroom to myself? a stable relationship? a job with coworkers who care about me?

past me would have desperately wanted these things and assumed i would be blissfully happy and grateful to have these things, that once i had them i would be set for life.

(i suspect future me will laugh at my present woes too! my parents are healthy, my friends are healthy, i’m healthy)

i guess there are two ways to tell my story,

one where my illness

sent me down a path of compounding opportunity losses. because the trauma of not just the hospitalization but also my interaction with harvard administration, followed by my advisor telling me to apply elsewhere when i did return, set me up for defensiveness and anxiety around interacting with professors (or generally people in positions of power), which made it hard for me to communicate well with others, which meant i stumbled through grad school, which meant i was always in a state of emergency, and on top of covid meant i never had a chance to really learn from other people and have technical mentors and network, which leads to the current situation, where half my friends have no problem with income stability and have people chasing them down and here i struggle to find employment.

and it is almost impossible for me to make up this compounded gap now. i can sense the gulf between my friends and i.

(i’m scared even to type these words out. it still haunts me, the feeling that i need to prove myself to some future manager or else. some nightmare that i never quite emerged from and probably will not until years of stable income)

and the other story of triumph

the other story is i dragged myself out of the terrifying 24/7 nightmare of psychosis, out of the locked psych ward where my goals were to earn points to go on supervised walks outside, through graduate school by sheer stubbornness,

and now have a doctorate from Harvard in computer science, with friends all over the world rooting for me and reaching out to help me up onto my feet.

the misc. thoughts

that i should take ownership of that story and what role *i* played in it.

take ownership of the things i did right and not just what i did wrong. acknowledge that i was born into privileges others do not, but I personally did also have to put in the work to accomplish my degrees and get my jobs

it’s not just the uncontrollable whims of fate that led me to where i am, but that i do have agency in it. fate is a disempowering feeling, but preparing for luck to strike is an empowering feeling.

it was always anxiety about why present me isn’t where i want to be.

but now that i’m not mired in fear (will i never be independent?), it is a little easier to ask where i could be in a few months. then assuming no major disaster strikes, what I can do to get there?

and then check my main assumption, is my life stable such that I will still exist and be okay in a few months?

and yes, I have a more tangible belief now that my job struggles do not have to mean something irrevocably wrong with me or what i’m doin, or how loss compounds so it’s impossible for be to catch up. that one day there could be a job where i feel valued and valuable and respected and mentored and encouraged to thrive, where i can think beyond whether i will ever make enough money to have kids and focus instead on making a difference and excelling in my work.

yes, it was a fantasy that if only i wrote a paper — if only i passed quals — if only i graduated — if only i had steady income — i would be happy. but it was not a fantasy that i’m less miserable now. so. i’ll work hard to become employed and have a year where i’m not stressed about money. and i look forward to having the problems of too much work and too many people demanding my time and when my problem is how i want to make a difference.

if the income over time curve is an S, if you draw the line at any given timepoint then yes, i’m permanently behind. if you look at societal averages then yes, i’m permanently below average.

but there is some trick, to zooming in and looking just at my own journey. now that it’s less painful to look at. i can say perhaps my curve is just shifted to the right a bit in time rather than shifted down in income. that in five years, in ten years, i will have income like my friends do now. it’s not impossible.

but in the meantime i’ll be 34 and unemployed and sailing the ocean 😭🤣

reading geriatrics papers right now for work; just feeling a bit sad thinking that a year ago scientists were abuzz thinking about advances in alzheimers research and right now the scientists i talk to are thinking about when their jobs will evaporate

sad to see us squander our reputation for world-class research and lead in translational science and all this deep expertise and indeed the next generation of scientists for the sake of some tax breaks for trillionaires or whatever

and the targeted CDC shooting is so shocking, and sad that on top of that it’s barely a news blip; i worked there two summers in high school

i hope things change soon for the better and we learn a lesson and form a collective dream of a better future

i guess it has been on my mind a lot between working in the federal government in the Musk era and also having lots of friends in tech, but

if you eek 10% more out of each employee, running at 110%, that sounds amazing perhaps as a CEO

“hey look we’re such an elite, in-demand company, our company-wide policy is to fire the lowest 10% every year”

but what actually happens is that teams no longer have time to help other teams and become territorial (“file a ticket if you want help”). it’s way more efficient for someone with expertise to spend an hour or two helping out another team that’s stuck. but that’s not possible when everyone is asked for 110%.

it’s actually better from the CEO perspective to aim for 90% and bask in the flow of collaboration and productivity. (I say from the armchair)

but i’m starting to realize CEOs are also just people, maybe even somewhat risk-averse people, and thus may be prone to groupthink (see: the absurd proliferation of LLMs into every piece of software. literally found a “CEO playbook for generative AI” by IBM).

and in the “mandatory layoffs” situation (which apparently is policy at facebook now), people can actually start sabotaging other people. at one of the rallies, I met a lady who worked on internet infrastructure for 25 years. one of the reasons for retiring was over the decades when this sort of “corporate mindset” spread from GE (who started it) to her small company employer. (also apparently the % of women very noticeably decreased)

understaffing vs overstaffing

nowadays i think about organizational dysfunction a lot. and how understaffing can cause the same symptoms as overstaffing: people aren’t getting work done, not because of some colossal waste of money, but because people can’t get the things they need to do their job, because other teams are too short-staffed to help provision the needed resources, so people just make do until the other team can get around to it.

and the solution is actually more staffing in the appropriate places, rather than terrorizing people into magically producing more work.

side note: underwatering and overwatering plants can give similar symptoms too ! but wildly unrelated

other things on my mind:

being haunted by a fellow party-goer’s words,
“We could have had the first AIDS free generation. But not anymore.”

just knowing those deaths, and the dismantling of USAID, is washed away in all the chaos

“the first thing the world’s richest man did when he got unfettered access to power was take away money for the poor and medicine for the sick” (some internet quote)

and also in Signal gate, lost in the discussion is the fact that this (presumably bad person) was visiting his partner’s apartment complex and in bombing that building, 50+ other innocent people died for the bad fortune of living in the same apartment building. 💪 🇺🇸 ?

but overall, my feelings are still: top priorities for fixing what’s broken in our country is… axing medical research? seriously?

and my friend saying he absolutely recognizes the bullying behavior (re: trump targeting harvard) since that’s the way the nigerian president operates

it was nice to bike past harvard plaza today and see a clump of people with “northeastern supports harvard” today.

hattip to various people i’ve talked to over the past month(s) who i guess i always err on the side of undernaming but idk