Tag: life

Best way to battle negative thoughts

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the best way to deal with negative thoughts?
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Okay! We all live on a tiny piece of dust next to a very old star that’s eventually going to consume Earth. We’ve not be informed about our purpose but we know we’re all going to die. It’s not easy to deal with all of that and the other reasons to feel bad about the future. Negative thoughts use periods of vulnerability from stress, health, or other misfortunes and just penetrate the walls and take space we can use for, pretty much, anything else. By the time they reach us, it might already be late to act in the most efficient way.

Here’s my short list, listing multiple items that have helped me over the years.

  • Walking. 1h outdoors is like 2h of meditation. Also helps with sleep. I didn’t start the 10k/day to improve my mental health but after doing it for several years, hard to not put it on top of my list.
  • Sleep – the brain just works better when properly rested but it can’t do that if it’s fed with coffee and alcohol, or you’re not physically tired. So…
  • No alcohol or coffee. I’ve experimented in this area and no amount of alcohol or coffee is good.
  • Planning positive events ahead, just placing good things in the calendar. Planting them like seeds to grow in anticipation.
  • Cats (and dogs btw) but cats work for me. Cats don’t care.
  • Religion and spirituality – after all, we need a way to accept defeat.
  • Awareness about thinking errors. Most of our fears are about stuff we have no control over. I think superstitions can be particularly harmful. People are universally afraid of black cats. Why?
  • Reading books, fiction in particular.

None of that counters negative thoughts at the moment, and none of this is a measure against moments of grief and loss. But it helps over the long run.

I re-read some of my old posts in preparation to publish this one. I think they still hold.

My three-month sabbatical

~ Veselin ~ 13 Comments

I spent three months not working. Today is the last day of AFK, already mentally preparing to get back to work, starting tomorrow.

Automattic has this fantastic benefit that for every five years of tenure, you get a 3 month vacation that you can take all at once. You can’t split it, and you can’t work while taking it. Just sign off from everything and do whatever.

I had big plans for the sabbatical. You know, stuff I want to do, can do, busy things that would’ve eaten up most of the AFK. Thankfully, I didn’t share the big plans here, as that would’ve committed me to following up. I did a little bit of planned activities but mostly had a vacation.

My grand plan was that I’m going to master experimentation. I was under the growing feeling that something about my understanding of how experiments should run is wrong, and built myself a study plan with six books. I read four, though not four of the original six because I changed what I want to read next twice.

So, if not doing the grand plan, what did I do?

First two weeks were pure unwinding. It’s a feeling that’s really difficult to explain, I’ve had one sabbatical before and didn’t experience it. Doing any type of work is stressful and each morning, your body wakes up thinking about it, and willing to face that stress, and expend energy there. This stress accumulates and puts some permanent weight on you. Remove that and it leaves a void of some kind. The body still wakes up, ready to face the challenges of the day, but there are no challenges. So, two weeks of slowly adjusting to the feeling I don’t need to worry today. Around the end of these two weeks, I understood that my grand plan won’t happen.

What I did instead

  • Played football with my kids.
  • Went to Musala (twice) and Vihren with my family, three successful summits.
  • Had joint reading sessions with the kids. As a result, the little one read six books about the Ninja boy, and is at the end of Alice. The big one read the Dungeon Crawler Carl 1 & 2, and most of the Three Musketeers.
  • Did math classes with the kids. Little one understood some of the second and third grade math and got stuck with text problems. Big one went over most of the material for his next grade. Not sure how much he understood, but I feel like we both improved.
  • Kept walking, kept doing pull ups almost daily.
  • Watched lots of YouTube. I now know how engines are disassembled, how to solve higher degree polynomial math problems, and a lot more about local AI setups. I watched a guy repair a Bugatti, and another one waste endless hours to online scammers, and a third guy fix broken video cards.
  • Visited my parents more often.

I think the reading with kids was probably the most impactful thing I did. I feel the AI revolution is negatively affecting them, lowering the quality of the text and video they’re exposed to. Learning and improving still requires reading and understanding advanced text. Books don’t come naturally to their lives, like they did in my, when I was their age. So I’m happy that they read some books and will be a bit more prepared for their next grades.

I’m very thankful to Automattic for the Sabbatical benefit. I feel I used it well.

Best purchase ever

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What is the best purchase you have ever made?
View all responses

I try to not get too attached to items and keep them replaceable.

I grew up in an environment when we couldn’t really own anything expensive. One day, my parents brought home beautiful fake adidas pants with three stripes (I think it was abidas or something like that). I went out with it and a kid pushed me down during play (probably on purpose) so my pants got torn. I learned by that mistake and the next fancy thing (a sweather) my parents brought, I didn’t wear at all. Then there was a birthday party and I wanted to put it on, and it was already too small. I outgrew it. So that didn’t work either.

Later in life, I had a chance to experience shopping stuff I need and want, I need and don’t want, I want but don’t need, and even stuff I neither wanted or needed. I it was around my mid-30s when I established some stable principles and conclusions about purchases.

  • The satisfaction you get from a new car and from a new book is not too far out but the car is far more expensive
  • Storage space is a limiting factor for the things you want but don’t need. Space management requires a good sense of minimalism. Once you learn how to throw away things, you get attached to items even less and no longer buy as much as before
  • You can’t be cheap on stuff you’ll use for work, and some of the hardware that frequently fails, I keep fallbacks. I have multiple backup glasses, some kept at specific locations, multiple headphones, countless chargers, cables, connectors, a battery that can recharge my computer and so on.

So with this philosophy, the items I buy are replaceable. Even my book collection is fluid, with a constant outflow of books that get donated.

If I can nominate one item that was life changing and at the same time inexpensive and easily replaceable, that’s my Apple Watch. It keeps me walking.

What would you do if you won the lottery?

~ Veselin ~ 12 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What would you do if you won the lottery?
View all responses

A fellow blogger Dr. Victor Bodo wrote about the types of happiness. He identified 4 types of happiness by origin – coming from pleasure, from purpose, from spirituality, and one from following a wise path. Lottery winnings can greatly impact the first type of happiness. However, I don’t think they can make me younger, smarter, healthier, wiser, or more connected to the family and community, leaving the 3 other types of happiness unchanged or at risk.

I once met a lottery winner while standing in line for bread. Those who have lived in communism know that shortages were common, and waiting in long lines for basic stuff was a daily chore. In my case, it was bread. An old man stood in front of me, loudly sharing the story of his life. Years ago, he had won the national lottery, with the prize being a large apartment. Winning didn’t spare him from aging—or from standing in line like everyone else.

So, in case I won the lottery, I think I’d rather invest the winnings and live a normal life than surrender to a life of luxury and riches. I might get myself an electric car 🙂

Last year I blogged that I think money can’t make you happier beyond a certain limit. I still believe it.

Do you remember life before the internet?

~ Veselin ~ 22 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Do you remember life before the internet?

I do, I’m old enough. The birthday of the Internet is officially 1983. I was 3 years old in 1982, a first-year kindergarten kid. My parents lived outside of Sofia because of permit issues – socialism regulated who lived where and they didn’t have permission to stay in Sofia. We lived in a rented bungalow in a village nearby that had running water but no bathroom. I was banned from visiting the toilet because my parents were afraid I’d fall in. We had flowers, trees, and a manual water pump. I remember that I ate the dandelions. The puddles had frogs. We were told touching the frogs would cause warts, so the interaction was with sticks and stones (no frogs were harmed). We had a small hill that was good for sleds in the winter. A train line was not far, and we had to walk by the tracks to reach the kindergarten.

The Web was invented in 1994, birthing a prototype of the modern Internet and many supergiant services. I was already hooked to computers by 1994. We had 8-bit computers at school, and I studied programming with Basic (ignore the first paragraph on that post). We also had computer clubs where kids could watch how other kids played, which was almost as good as playing yourself. Smoking was permitted inside so you could cut the thick gray air like cheese. I spent my summers around the chess bridge club in Stara Zagora which had 20-ish XT and 80286 computers.

Both milestones I associate with the freedom to roam around and having lots of free time away from my parents. Sofia and Stara Zagora had fewer cars, and it was considered safe to let your kid play on the street with other kids without supervision. I was allowed to go to school by myself from 1st grade when I was 6, a right my kids are deprived of by law. Culturally, we got our highs from books, VHS videos, and audio cassettes. The influencers existed but spoke from the TV, rather than social media.

I’d say, life was simpler and not necessarily better or worse. I like my hot water and inside toilet, the Macbook Air, and the WIFI but playing football every day was also great. And can we get rid of the cars? That was such a civilisation-level mistake.