goldstream

i have relocated to goldstream, alaska! i’m spending a total of three weeks here, hanging out with several ucla alumni in what is essentially a house in the woods near fairbanks. i lived with one of the people this past spring; the others are their college friends whom i didn’t know prior to coming here. week one happened already and week two is the final week of my job, so i will soon be free from thinking about modeling financial markets, hopefully for life! i’m very excited for week three, which is when i’ll have no obligations and will be able to just work on whatever i want to and hopefully be outside a lot 🙂 i don’t want to post pics of the house or my housemates so here is the road leading up to the house: 

sunrise is around 5:30am and sunset is around 11pm, which means it’s fairly bright for 20+ hours a day. i get up at 5am to work on eastern time hours, which has been extremely exhilarating. admittedly the first few minutes after waking up are pretty disorienting and not fun, but everything after that initial period is fine. i’d forgotten how nice it is to sit next to people you like, even when you’re working on separate activities — for the first time all summer, my job has actually been bearable. (this is not intended to be a statement about my parents. when i was at home we would all work in separate rooms by default)

as much as i’ve complained about not living in an urban area this summer, i know that if i were in eg. ny or sf again i’d be completely overwhelmed by all the people to see and foods to try and places to visit, and probably wouldn’t have much time for myself. i imagine returning to campus next semester will feel like that, so i’m glad i’m not spending the summer in a similarly noisy environment

sometimes i joke that i am living in a scenic rural location to cleanse my soul after working in finance. there is some truth to that, but i suppose there are many other things to escape from besides my job. for instance, nostalgia — i realized i have a hard time concentrating at home because of the presence of memory triggers everywhere. or time zones — living on alaskan time is a sort of subtle detail that alters my internet usage significantly, because divorcing from the rest of the usa’s schedule makes it much easier to step away from social media and online content. perhaps there is also my age; i do not think i am ready to go back to thinking about classes and clubs and such all the time after being so free last semester, and so living with a group of 23-to-25-year-olds and talking about their post-grad lives has been very refreshing

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some people have been asking why i’m spending so much time on spirituality-adjacent topics, or, as one person put it, “weird pseudoscience bs”, presumably referring to everything i’ve written over the past few months about gratitude and egos and watching psychedelic buddhist tv episodes and reading meditations and bhagavad gita. and on one hand, the question confuses me because i don’t understand how you can not be curious about these things — all of this is various peoples’ attempts to answer questions such as how to keep piece of mind or live with suffering, which i feel like are universally relevant and interesting by default, and i’m not really sure why this is apparently weird enough to warrant justification? 

but the more relevant answer is that this entire endeavor is my response to not feeling well. as you probably inferred if you’ve been following this blog for a while, my mental health is not terrible but is also far from great. i have generally avoided writing about this explicitly, and have also shied away from unloading on people, which is why i often send messages like “FUCJK” with no accompanying explanation in one of my discord servers. i’m not really sure what specific problems i have, though it’s probably mostly a combination of covid disruptions and making the transition from high school to college poorly and bad habits accumulated from adolescence, or maybe it’s simply the case that mental unwellness is the default state of existence and there doesn’t need to be a reason to be in it. i have no idea how true that last claim is

but anyway, what i said relating to gratitude in market correction was about not feeling heavy and sad all the time, and everything i’ve since been learning about stoicism and non-western belief systems has been me looking for additional structure to support feeling less bad. for the most part it has been incredibly helpful to hear what other schools of thought have to say, regardless of whether i relate to the content, like, i don’t need to agree with marcus aurelius on logos or with hinduism on dharma to be able to appreciate how those ideas can stabilize your life. so i guess i’m mostly writing this to assert that exploring these subjects is not weird and can potentially be very beneficial, and you should feel free to if you’re curious

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i am honestly not sure how other people maintain mental health. a few people i know are very good at entering flow states, either from immersion in work or creating art or whatever, or from being highly spiritual or self-aware or internally aligned. i’m hoping i’ll eventually get good at flow; so far it’s only happened to me occasionally while writing or playing cello. a few of my other friends rely on distractions like religion or entertainment or relationships. probably some are also just not sufficiently aware of their mental state to have a good read on how they feel most of the time, either from being busy or from a lack of introspection. but i think if you add up all the people i just listed you end up with a number much smaller than the total number of people i know, so i guess the question is, what is everyone else doing to take care of themselves? 

maybe the answer is just “nothing”, but it’s hard for me to believe that you can do nothing to take care of yourself and still not feel miserable most of the time, because my experience has been very much to the contrary. it seems much more likely to me that you either are performing acts of self-care without realizing it, or have just not noticed the extent of your misery yet (both of which have been true for me in the past). so i’m actually fairly confused; is there something obvious i’m not understanding here or some other large category of people i am not accounting for? 

anyway, i am feeling a lot better now than i did in june or july. moving to alaska and reading a lot more and the soon-to-be end of my job have all been helpful. i am not sure if my current mental state will last through returning to mit; in fact i do not expect it to, but worrying is something i am trying to do less of so i will not worry about school for now