stuck on repeat

Life has kind of entered a comfortable lull. I’m aware of my dissatisfaction with the way things are going, but am too scared to leave what I’ve spent so long nurturing. Especially the case with my apartment in Sunnyvale, I’ve luckily received many compliments on how clean we keep it, and the nice amenities; and when I tell my friends the rent, they generally are like “Wow that’s quite good”. Nonetheless, it’s a rather isolating part of silicon valley and I don’t think I’ll ever form a sense of community here at the rate I’m currently going.

It’s too easy to just stay at home and work, and then stay at home and loiter around, and go do one or two things on the weekends and convince yourself that that’s all there is to life. I suppose so, but what an underwhelming way to exist. Here I am, after working so hard throughout college, I’ve finally landed a SWE job that I’ve pushed aside all other things in life to get (imho vastly overcompensated), and now I’m sitting in my empty living room complaining about my life in a poorly written substack. And I’m 23.

Historically, I’ve coped with the indoor solitude by just making endless personal projects. You could just take a second and peruse the repos on my Github, just absolutely endless abandoned projects. Each one a testament to how I got bored and wanted to create something of meaning within the confined grey walls I lived in, and whittled away on the computer.

Now, after using Unity since 2014ish, I don’t particularly want to make projects on the computer anymore as my hobby. Not that it was all there was to me, but it was largely a coping mechanism to how my parents would not let me go out throughout high school and the summers of college. I took refuge in game development, maybe I couldn’t live the life I wanted to, but at least I might be able to create a world worth playing in. It’s really all about escapism for me, and hasn’t ceased to be either.

However, context has now changed. I’m living on my own with my own roommates. I could really do a whole lot of the things that I wanted to do, considering now I’m on my own. But time has passed. College is over. My friends have found their routines and moved on to focusing on work for the most part. I would say this is the case for my relationship too. It doesn’t seem like anyone I have the luxury of surrounding myself with in this present moment is looking to grow in any way besides perhaps getting better at work, but even then people will only say stuff like this with a heavy tint of stress and annoyance.

I feel like I’ve hit critical mass where I am. There doesn’t feel like there’s anywhere else to grow. Not only that, it doesn’t appear to be encouraged by the sedentary environment that is silicon valley, notably outside the space of startups, which carry their own problems that I will undoubtably imbibe myself eventually.

But it’s not really this fact that bothers me so much as the fact that I feel so lonesome in my distress at this pacing when it doesn’t seem like it bothers anyone else. It feels like the stagnancy I felt when living at home, except tinged with the regret that I didn’t do more in college before COVID hit considering the present situation.

All this has led me to do more and more things alone that I never would have before, especially considering my extroverted personality. I’ve been traveling alone, hiking alone, making things alone (I guess this one is usual), driving to lookouts alone, eating alone, etc. Soon catch me going to bars alone. Maybe this fall should have been predicted considering the hedonistic treadmill I built up at UCLA. Or maybe it’s just what happens when the shiny newness of a new area (silicon valley) washes off and you suddenly realize why people live in SF/NYC/LA. Or maybe it’s something only my therapist will be able to piece together from his or her years of dealing with fallen newgrads. All I know is I like to solve problems, but this one, I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with it.

Originally published on Substack. View the source version ↗