Skip to main content

On my way home!

I have been thinking about why I keep running into new existential crises almost every week. I am tempted to blame AI for no reason like I usually do, but let me be real and admit it all has to do with the choice I made to book a one-way flight to the United States four years ago. I thought it would be like a trip to Hawaii - I go, have fun, return home, bite everyone's ears off about my experiences in Hawaii even if they don't want to listen. But it turned out to be like space travel. I end up feeling like the only living being floating in vast nothingness, where gravity doesn't exist and sunlight doesn't reach, and don't even ask me about how far I am from home and how lonely it feels.

Every day I wake up in this strange place, I experience one of the following two feelings - either an unbearable mental ache where I start cursing a 24-year old me for making the choice that 28-year old me has to struggle with, or a relief and joy that I am floating freely without the pull of gravity. I have no clue which of these two feelings hits me on a particular day, it's as random as a coin toss, or for an example closer to home, it's as random as weather in Dallas. I do sometimes think about giving up on all this, and just going back to the familiar warmth and comfort of home. But I think living alone has made me so uncivilized that I am afraid I don't belong in the civilization anymore. Kind of like Tarzan, but space version. 

While I am stuck in this position of weird Zugzwang (a situation in chess when any possible move I can take only makes things worse), next week is supposed to be interesting. A magical portal (H1B lottery results) may appear that will transport me back to home in one year period. If it appears, I don't know if I will be sad that my space adventure is ending, or a relief that I can finally let gravity pull my feet down to ground. If it doesn't appear, my journey will extend for another six years, which I don't know how I feel about. Will it be another six years of me waking up not knowing which existential crisis will hit me that day? 

See, I know nothing at all, except for one thing. Regardless of when this journey will end - one year, six years or sixty years, I will try to keep floating ahead, and when my time comes, I will go out with a smile hopefully!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Solving Customer Churn with a hammer!

Learning when data should take a back seat and give way to domain knowledge is a valuable skill. Suppose you built a machine learning model on the data of your customers to predict churn risk. Now that you have a risk score for each customer, what do you do next? Do you filter the top n% based on the risk and send them a coupon with a discount in the hopes that it will prevent churn? But what if price is not the factor driving churn in many of these customers? Customers might have been treated poorly by customer service, which drove them away from your company's product.  Or there might have been an indirect competitor's product or service that removes the need for your company's product altogether (this happened to companies like Blockbuster and Kodak in the past!) There could be a myriad of factors, but you get the point! Dashboards and models cannot guide any company's strategic actions directly. If companies try to use them without additional context, more often tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is SUTVA for A/B testing?

Imagine if person B’s blood pressure reading depends on whether person A receives the blood pressure medicine in a randomized controlled trial. This will be violating Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) SUTVA states that the treatment received by an individual should not influence the outcome we see for another individual during the experiment. I know the initial example sounded absurd, so let me try again. Consider LinkedIn A/B testing a new ‘dislike’ reaction for its users, and the gods of fate chose you to be part of the initial treatment group that received this update. Excited after seeing this new update, you use this dislike reaction on my post and send a screenshot to a few of your connections to do the same, who are coincidentally in the control group that did not receive the update. Your connections log in and engage with my posts to use this dislike reaction, but later get disappointed as this new update is not yet available to them. The offices of LinkedIn are tr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Curing writer's block with sunk cost fallacy

I paid $20 to renew this blog's domain in July. But the truth is, I had been suffering from writer's block ever since the start of this year and hadn’t posted a single thing. At one point, I was ready to give up on the blog altogether, but a voice in my head kept reminding me of all the time and money I’d already invested in this blog. So, this week, I sat down to write this imperfect, patchy article—about none other than that voice itself.  Let me start with a classic scenario where you might have also encountered this voice. Suppose you’re at an Italian restaurant and ordered some pasta and tiramisu. After finishing the pasta, you realize you’re full, and there’s no way your stomach can handle that delicious tiramisu sitting right in front of you. But then, that beautiful brain of yours reminds you that you’ll be paying for the tiramisu whether you eat it or not. In a desperate attempt to avoid wasting money, you reluctantly eat two quick bites. And just like that, my frien...
Post a Comment
Read more