One thought experiment I’ve seen on TikTok recently is the idea of getting coffee with your younger self. These videos encouraged me to think about how a conversation with my 17 year old self would go like.
This update is centred around how I feel like I’ve changed throughout my university experience and ending with what I would tell pre-university Richard.
The biggest change I see in myself has to do with awareness: about my own inner life, how I came across to other people, and of what actually matters.
Personal
If something made me insecure, or uncomfortable, I didn’t know how to process those feelings.
A lot of growth has been learning that strength is not keeping everything inside. It is being honest enough with yourself to admit what is going on, and trusting that letting other people see parts of that can actually help you grow.
That same lack of awareness showed up socially. I can laugh now at some of my only child instincts, like taking the last thing on the table without thinking to ask if anyone else wanted it. At the time it didn’t come from selfishness in an intentional sense. It came from not noticing enough.
In conversations, I often felt that if I wasn’t at the centre of it, my contribution didn’t matter. I wanted to say the sharp thing, or prove that I knew what was going on. A part of me still clings to this now, but I have grown more comfortable making room and listening.
I think that is also why parties, larger group hangouts, and unfamiliar environments felt so tense to me. I wasn’t just shy. I was unsure how to process uncertainty and too trapped inside my own head. A lot of my social growth has been becoming more comfortable with depth, more willing to ask important questions, and more able to be with other people without turning every interaction into a performance.
Once my personal awareness widened, my definition of success had widened too.
Success
I think younger Richard would have wanted to know one thing above all else: are we successful?
Most of what I cared about fit inside a narrow model of achievement. The dream felt very linear:
- do well in university
- land a co-op in California
- work at a big tech company
- keep advancing
When reflecting on my values being proportional to how one spends their time, I realized how much of my attention was going toward toxic CS subreddits and glamourized videos about how to become a software engineer. As I wrote in last weeks update, I never gravitated to ask why. I was heavily influenced by the mainstream definition of success and by what looked desirable to other people.
Success means something different to me now. It has more to do with how energetic I feel so I can be living in the present instead of chasing the next thing. It’s practicing gratitude and not taking for granted the opportunities we have been given. It’s about seeing the bigger picture and not optimizing for certain metrics.
One of the most transformative experiences I had during university came through a relationship. A relationship forced me to audit myself constantly: emotional intelligence, perspective, boundaries, mistakes I made, importance of space, and how everything doesn’t need to be going at 100mph. These reflections didn’t come through becoming a software engineer at FAANG or reaching some career milestone I once thought would define me. It came through having to consider things greater than myself.
What I Would Actually Tell Him
I always go back to Aesop’s Fable about the wind and the sun whenever I think about motivation to change behaviour. In this story, the wind tries to force a traveler to take off his coat but this only makes him hold it tighter. The sun warms him, and the traveler lets go on his own.
If I really got to talk to my younger self, I would try to give him something he didn’t know he needed: an outlet. Maybe I would simply ask him what he thinks success looks like, or whether he ever feels more uncertain than he lets on, and then let the conversation open from there. I would want to encourage him to question more deeply, not force him into conclusions he hasn’t lived enough to understand yet.
Why I Write
As much as I can now see what younger Richard couldn’t, I also assume there is some future version of me, maybe Richard in 2053 (I’d be 50 years old!), who would look back at the person writing this and laugh a little too. Not in a cruel way, but in the way you laugh when you realize how much someone still had not experienced, how much they still couldn’t see, and how seriously they mistook partial awareness for the whole picture.
An idea from The Courage to be Disliked (Matt D’Avella’s analysis) that I love is that life isn’t a line from birth till death. It’s a series of small dots because we shouldn’t be looking at the future for some specific finish line. Life is a collection of present moments.
Reflecting and documenting my values and thoughts is my way of capturing what life looks like from this specific dot. That is one reason I care about writing these weekly updates. One day I want to look back at these entries and see not only what I believed, but what I had not yet learned how to notice.
Interesting Ideas
- Project Hail Mary: Sci-fi is one of my favourite genres: Interstellar, The Martian, and For All Mankind (season 5 is out next Friday I’m so excited!!) are some of my all time favourite movies/shows to watch. Project Hail Mary definitely makes that list. It was surprisingly very funny, wholesome and also an example of how someone overcomes self-doubt and does his best given the cards he’s dealt with.
- I don’t like what the internet is doing to me.: The attention economy game is a fascinating concept: content on the internet is readily available (no scarcity) → addiction to information → creators pushing things out to capture our attention. This loop leads to creators starting off with good intentions and then slowly trying to optimize for the metrics (likes, comments, subscribers). A question I’ll end off with: is directing our attention all we need?
- Mylene’s TikTok: This was the original video I saw that inspired my reflection!