Dichotomy of Control

11:55 PM

I learned about the dichotomy of control back in 2018 after reading a book on stoicism. It's about how there are things we have control over and thing we don't have control over, and that for our joy and sanity, to only focus on the things we can control. This idea and mindset was liberating to me, because 2018 was a time of hurt, stress, and turmoil for me, all internal based on factors out of my control.

I was alone and felt alone, and felt like no one was having the same problems as me. Although looking back, and even observing people today, it seems like we are all suffering in some similar way.

The problems I experienced at the time were all self-imposed. I wasn't where I wanted to be, I felt like I was lacking in skill, knowledge, purpose, influence, relevance. I still feel an inkling of each of those today, though I am much further along today than back then. I do have skill and knowledge now, I do have purpose, I have significantly more influence today than back then, I feel more relevant today than back then. However, I do still feel like I'm not where I want to be. I do still want to accomplish and do more with my life.

Not everything stays stable either. A few days ago, without even trying, several of my vegan related posts on Twitter got 30k+ views. I spent like a few minutes writing some tweets, and they went sort of viral, getting that many views. I made some more tweets yesterday and today, and they didn't perform as well, only a few hundred views. Seeing posts go from 30k+ views to just hundreds the next day, honestly feels disappointing, but it's not something I have any control over. A month or two ago one of my posts got around 100k views, and then obviously much less the next day. So, things such as influence can fluctuate and not stay stable. We might have more influence and relevance one day, and then less the next, and then more some other day, and so on.

I didn't have anything close to this kind of influence back in 2018. I didn't have any social media back then. I did temporarily for some, and I had very few followers on them too. Relatively speaking, I still don't have that many followers today, only around 1.8k followers on Twitter. I still feel pretty insignificant and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, considering there are people with 2k followers, 5k followers, 10k followers, even 100k followers, and over a million followers (this is extremely rare). Although I am so much further along than in 2018.

I was also unhappy with my financial situation back in 2018. I was not broke, I was not in debt, in 2013 I was both of those, and I was in a desperate situation, but I worked my way out. In 2018 I was just stable and that felt depressing. I was someone that rarely spent anything, I lived on $3 of food a day, I just ate primarily rice and beans, and some fruits like avocado, ground flax seed, this was honestly my life. I was actually pretty happy living this way at the time, I felt like a true "life hacker" living on significantly less than anyone else. Today I could go back to how I lived before, back to spending under $3 of food a day, because honestly all those foods are still cheap today, even after all the inflation, but it's kind of hard to go back. Well, it isn't, but it sort of is.

In 2018 I felt pretty lost financially. Yeah I was stable and had a decent income, and had the most minimum of expenses, but I still felt lacking. My car was paid off, but I still lived with my parents. It's funny, I am in the same room, same bed, same exact body position I was in back then, as today as I'm typing this right now. My room furniture has never been rearranged nor changed, except maybe the curtains and of course the bed sheets, so basically everything is still the same today as back then. I am basically the same exact person today as back then, just a little older, just more experience, a lot of new travels, a lot of new adventures, and as I am in this same room, same exact everything, it feels like nothing has changed.

Today my finances are a lot better. I don't feel like I'm lacking in this area anymore, but I still do feel inadequate when I compare myself to much wealthier people who own houses, or my friends who make a lot more than I do. I have my own condominium with 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom in Puerto Rico fully paid off. It has all the furnishings, a bedroom, a gym, an office, and kitchen appliances and furniture. It's a very basic home, but I feel so comfortable now that I own a place and it just feels nice. Sure, I do not own a house, I do not have a garage, I don't have two stories, or more than one bathroom, but I am actually very comfortable.

I do still feel like I'm lacking when I talk to friends who earn more than me. I have friends who earn twice as much, three times as much, or more than that than me. They don't have their own homes paid off, but they have far more potential than I do in the long run with their income. So even being comfortable, if I compare myself upwards, then I feel less so.

My friendships and romantic life back then in 2018 was also pretty abysmal. Maybe Virginia just sucks for making friends, or maybe it's me becoming more cynical, or maybe it's due to all my past friends all moving far away, or maybe a combination of all of these, but I pretty much had no friends in real life back then. I hung out with some every now and then. I had friends in their mid 30s, while I was in my mid 20s, a big age gap there. I had friends in my age group that I sometimes hung out with, but we lived an hour away from each other, so it wasn't practical hanging out.

In Puerto Rico now, I have awesome friends I hang out with all the time, every other day basically. We go to the gym together, we hang out on weekends and go to the beach, have adventures, do vegan activism. It's amazing. I've also been in two relationships since I moved to Puerto Rico, and dated more women in three years there than I have in 20 years in Virginia, maybe. Yeah, definitely a big improvement in my social connections since 2018. I still feel lacking of course. I am alone as I type this up right now, so yeah I feel lacking.

In terms of physical fitness, I am much further along today than in 2018. I might have had more endurance in 2018, maybe, but I'm unquestionably much stronger today than in 2018. When my parents saw me again for the first time in a few months, just a few weeks ago when they picked me up from the airport, they both literally commented on how big I became, meaning more muscular. I was just sitting in the living room on my laptop when my mom commented "this kid is huge" about me, and my dad said something like "yeah he's getting big," which I didn't take as a compliment. I actually want to lose weight and become lighter.

I am still extremely unhappy with my stomach because I am still so fat and don't have abs, but I am now able to lift weights, do pull ups, do chin ups, do push ups, and so on, with ease. I wasn't able to back then. I wasn't able to do a single pull up or chin up back then, even as recently as 2022, but I was able to improve from scratch pretty easily on a plant based diet having not eaten meat for 11 years.

So, I think, overall, I've made pretty decent progress since 2018, since 2013 before that, and I should be very happy with where I am. To be honest, I am not. I still feel lacking, and I still want to do more with my life. I don't know where I will be in the future, but I still want improvement even compared to where I am today.

I can't wait for the feature for us to be able to add a custom prompt or checklist every day that we can complete alongside our journal entries. I will want to add prompts about what I improved on that day, what I learned that day, and so on. I want to add checklist items such as whether I exercised, and whether I was productive. I think this will be a great new feature that greatly opens up self-improvement.

I didn't even write about my day yet. I basically woke up, worked, and I completed all of my work items today. There's still some bug fixes and so on I can work on, but in terms of new features, I've completed all of them. I'm now waiting for my clients to test them out on Monday. If all is well, then we're good.

I started to head outside at around 4 PM, because I wanted to go for a walk, but then I saw there was a bunch of high school kids outside, taking up all the walking paths. My parents live right across a high school, I can literally see it from my bedroom. The kids were just starting to head home, and for some reason, I don't like walking on crowded paths, so I headed back home. I waited until 6 PM to go out. I was planning on walking for an hour or something, but due to leaving late at 6, I didn't want to be caught out in the dark, so I went to the gym instead and worked out there.

I also kept on reading some more premium articles on Medium, that I'm doing their 7 day trial for. The articles are sort of interesting to read. It's a bunch of opinion pieces, stories, news, on the most random and diverse amount of topics available. They are interesting to read. I haven't gotten anything extremely insightful from anything I've read so far, but their content is definitely more educational than Twitter/X and Facebook. Definitely more educational than TikTok, which is a cesspool.

Anyway, that was my day today.