https://livingwithshoggoths.substack.com/p/we-have-always-been-seapunks
"There’s something particularly unforgiving about feeling like you’ve wasted
your thirties. As 2024 was drawing to a close, and I was about to turn 38, that
was a feeling I regularly wrestled with. It’s not that I have wasted wasted my
thirties, so much as having had to spend a good chunk of it stumbling and
falling and getting back to the baseline I was at in the early years of that
decade. It’s a feeling of deja vu from having to confront the same decisions
again.
I remember precisely this moment when I was about to turn 30, and was not doing
so well in my attempts at trying to get my first proper corporate job, when it
dawned on me that, heck, I didn’t have to! I could keep doing this freelance
mish-mash of tech-for-social-good, sometimes paid, sometimes pro-bono stuff
that I had been dabbling in for the preceding few years and turn it into an
actual career. Maybe eventually start my own company with other like-minded
people. I excitedly went home to tell my (now ex-) wife about the epiphany—it
did not go well. I did it anyway. Financial struggles followed, but two years
later, I managed to start the company. It went well until it didn’t. After
building a dream team of like-minded people and an exhilarating (and
profitable) couple of years of working on civic tech and data journalism in my
home country, Myanmar, a military coup brought everything to a grinding halt.
Now, after years of slowly building things back up, I still struggle with the
anxiety of whether I had made good life decisions. That old question rears its
ugly head: “Shouldn’t I just give up on being a punk and get a real job?”
In every city in the world, there is some semi-gentrified neighborhood that
still maintains a rough edge, where you can find those old punks wandering the
streets with their mohawks, combat boots, and torn-up jeans. Carefree on the
surface but permanently inebriated to push down all their pain, holding on to
memories of some bygone glory days when they had a band that almost made it.
Across most of 2024, I felt like I was going to turn into whatever the techie
equivalent of that was."
Via Susan ****
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
