記不得那清晨入睡、午後轉醒的日子，究竟是從我年輕時代的什麼時候開始養起的。像養大一個孩子那樣地，白晝的日子漸漸矮小，夜晚慢慢長高。直到後來，照鏡子的時候，我就忽然有了一個臉面漆黑的孩子，陰影般地黏附在我的面孔上。像是夜晚的胎記。那奇怪的惡習起源，如今是怎樣也想不起來了，只記得閒散無課的大四時代，我幾乎是把一整年的白天給大肆睡掉的。這個惡習持續到了研究所時代，至今仍跟隨著我，使我在亮晃晃的白日底下走路，都感覺背負著一團黑色的影子。有段時間我背著這團黑小人到事務所去，工作，排隊，辦事。感覺五臟六腑都疼痛了起來。
afterwards i started catching glimpses of you in everyone around me, and i became sick of the city. there were many people here who genuinely believed in what they were doing, and i respected them immensely; but there were far more people who needed something to believe in and caught wind of whatever religion was spreading at the time and never looked back afterwards. i worried about ending up like that - swept up in the dreams of other people, locked into the orbit of ideas that were alien to me
one day I want to join a startup like this
This tendency to instrumentalize, or to treat something as a means or resource for achieving some end goal, shows up in the personal lives of many technologists. Many types of “fun” are made telic. Books must be read with a note-taking system; exercise must be quantified and tracked; friendships are managed in personal CRMs; casual hangouts and dating apps are covert recruitment missions.
You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.
Autopilot looks like staying in relationships, jobs, living situations, environments, you’re not fully happy, psychologically safe, in. It’s Not Bad though. It’s easy to just float on. Then in hindsight, possibly years after, it becomes obvious that it wasn’t optimal and it took you way too long to act on it.