so a recent realization that i will soon run out of reasons to stay in santa cruz almost made me shit bricks:
“change is coming, and you’re running out of reasons to deny it.”
i don’t know if this is because of the little shell i’ve formed in my heart about life and change in general, or if it’s just age catching up with me a little faster than it should, but i’ve realized that i’ve become one of those conservative-minded people who want no more than to maintain the status quo and just keep things where it’s comfortable.
but i look at my life now and keeping the status quo isn’t really my ideal of comfort: i barely know anyone in santa cruz anymore, i’m soon to go from being employed to unemployed, (for the most part anyway) my living conditions are far from what i want them to be, and it probably wouldn’t hurt if i went to the gym a few more times a week.
but yet, even as i know that in order for me to advance to the next step (or even maintain a trace of my current status quo) i need to embrace change i’m still stuck in a mental (and an emotional) stalemate where i’m irrationally afraid or uncomfortable about not being able to continue living the way i am now–even though i’m not at all satisfied with the way i am now.
maybe it’s complacency or maybe it’s some sort of clinical depression/s.a.d. or something i don’t know about, but for some reason i feel like i’m stuck in an abusive relationship where life is beating me merciless every day with everyone around me urging me to leave for greener pastures, but i keep shutting myself out of every opportunity to commit myself to what i know is going to be much better for me in the long haul…
anyway, here’s a few things that i’ve grown to hate about myself which has stemmed from this “inability to change”
1. social aptitude (or lack thereof)
since a long time ago, i’ve always had this mentality that i don’t really need that many friends in life — i just want to have a small group of friends that i can be comfortable with. that i can be myself around without reservations; a group of people i can be proud to say “oh i’ve known so and so for this long…” but lately this has become 期待外れ; up until last year, i thought that i reached my “full meter” on this imaginary quota of friends, and because i was 100% content with my social status/situation i kinda got into this trend of avoding unnecessary social contact. and now that none of those friends are around any more, it’s kind of come to bite me in the ass this year, and i kind of feel like i’m intentionally ひきこもる-ing myself to maintain some sort of exalted, yet fruitless ideal. but yeah, it does seem like i’m really at a stalemate here since i probably won’t be here for too much longer, and i know very well how “good” i am at leaving friends behind…
2. act my fucking age
maybe this is ill-founded, but the last two years of being in santa cruz made me think that maybe i grew up too fast. what seems to be routine college-approved behavior always seems immature and baseless; sometimes the way my peers “think” and “act” seems totally absurd and nonsensical to me. one thing that’s been bothering me in particular is the way “visitors” (or friends of housemates) act when they come over to our house; they make a mess everywhere that they usually don’t clean up after (for like a week), they use other peoples stuff without asking, break things and try to cover it up thinking “getting away with it and pretending that nothing happened” is the best way out… the list is endless, but it makes me wonder if college is actually making these people smarter or is just serving as a giant baby sitting facility for all the people who refused to grow up even after leaving their parents’ nest. if i could, i would go up to them and say “i’m pretty damn sure you don’t act like this when you’re at your own house, so why the fuck are you acting like this here?”
3. bias
i’ve noticed increasingly that i’m becoming a very biased person based on things that i know are reliable. confusing concept, i know. but my inability (?) to change is invading my thought process, and is making me think in a way that it thinks will incur the least amount of change. for example, i know that doing something in a new way will probably raise productivity and make things go faster, but because i’ve been doing something a specific way for god knows how many years, and i know that it works, i don’t really see a need to compromise, even when i know that it’s clearly better for me. this “bias” has also rubbed off in the way i see/treat people as well — i’ve been starting to take what my friends are telling me a lot more seriously, knowing that i’ve known them for long and that they’re trustworthy, even when there was a little voice telling me that there’s something wrong about what they’re saying – and taking it over rational thought and logical judgment. maybe it’s a good thing, maybe it’s not — but i think my brain is growing this little sense of entitlement saying “i’ve worked over twenty long years to get you this far, let me rest and just take the easy way out when i can” but i don’t know, it’s something that eats at me little by little, among other things.
but in either case, whether i decide to keep up with the status quo or finally accept impending change, one thing that’s for sure is that something’s got to give — the least i can do is try to ease myself into a new life by changing the little things that i do have control over — sometimes i actually feel like i’m a big 塊 of all these conditions and diseases listed in the DSM and that all these “conditions” take turns manifesting themselves on the surface (i think the most prevalent one right now is “control freak” and “被害者意識“) but yeah, in either case i need to do a little more than lock myself in this little bubble i’ve created for myself and maybe start doing something about it as opposed to just rambling on in a blog post that most likely nobody will read.
oh and this post is entitled “the study of change” because of this idea i had earlier on today, inspired by an etymologistic definition (words inspire me in a different way than it does most people, as you can see) :
Calculus is the study of how things change. It provides a framework for modeling systems in which there is change, and a way to deduce the predictions of such models.
it took something as complicated as calculus to figure out how things change — now what kind of rocket science do we have to study to understand why things change?
