Just Keep Swimming

 

1.     Yesterday night I had to review a pull request until 10 pm, and I didn’t know a lot of things in it. I love that my job throws me into unknown waters, and asks me to figure out myself how to swim to the surface, but it’s also stressful to do it every single time. I drown 9 out of the 10 times. I wish someone throws me a life jacket, but no, all I get is a subscription to Claude. But I also have been feeling grateful lately - for the first time in my life, I am in a job role where I am overwhelmed not by the piling up of mindless tasks, but rather by the number of new things to learn. So, for now, I am trying to be like Dory, and sing “just keep swimming.” I am not expecting to become very good at this swimming thing, but maybe I will at least learn how to float! (of course, swimming is a metaphor because I don’t actually know how to swim)

 

2.     I am learning to deal with some of my not-so-funny patterns like self-blame and rumination. Writing is one of my tools for that, because I have this power of looking at myself and the external world objectively in written text, which allows me to be more honest. I have also been doing a lot of reading lately, which helps satiate my curiosity, and sometimes also brings excellent self-reflections. But I am always conscious of this one fact I have learned about human nature – sometimes just learning all the terminology and theories can give me an illusion of progress. I constantly need to remind myself that Intellectualization is not internalization, or else I may go down the wrong path with my mental health again.  

 

3.     I am now surprised that learning how to deal with emotions was not part of my education curriculum growing up. I understand it comes naturally for people who have been exposed to different life experiences, but why are we taking a chance on people eventually figuring it all out. It’s like saying sex education is not important, and people will just figure it out after they have bad experiences. Now I think about it, that’s exactly how a lot of cultures approach sex ed, and no wonder their attitude towards mental health is similar. But again, I don’t want to be stuck blaming the past and external things, so I will just let it go for my own sake.

 

4.     One of my favorite topics to think about ironically is the “thinking errors” made by humans. I got introduced to them when I was new to data science, and was reading about how people tend to put more weightage to the information they already know over the new information (confirmation bias). It led me into this deep rabbit hole of reading about other cognitive biases, logical fallacies, psychology, neuroscience etc. But I myself am prone to so many thinking errors. Feynman says knowing the name of a theory doesn’t actually mean you understand it deeply, but I will go a step ahead and say that even if you understand something deeply, it doesn’t become automatic behavior. This is because humans have two systems of thinking – a default, fast, and often irrational system, and a lazy, slow, and sometimes rational system (this is again something I learned from the “Thinking Fast and Slow” book by Daniel Kahneman). When we learn something rationally, it is stored in the lazy system, but default system takes time to catch up. But compare it to learning something through experience, like trusting someone deeply and getting that trust broken in brutal ways. That experience gets stored in your default system, and will take years for the lazy rational system to override it. This is why you can’t always intellectualize your way out of emotions like fear and sadness. Or to put it in a different way, I can read all the material in the world about swimming, yet feel adrenaline and fear surge through me when my skin touches that chlorine-infused water