Turning 33

Day 122 of writing every day.

I turned 33 today. Since I’m a year older on paper, I think I’ll reflect on life for this post.

When you’re in your teens you never really think about getting old. I think most would look at the adults around thinking they’ll never become like them. As the years pass by though, you just get older without thinking about it. Life gets busy and you find yourself trying to resolve issues only to discover your lofty dreams as a young adult aren’t going to become a reality. Some teens don’t even have the luxury of being kids and have to work to survive or get involved in crime that takes away their chance to “just be kids.”

Regardless of whatever adolescence we all had, many mistakes get made along the way up to the present. However, relationships between people as adults often feel too transactional instead of just being fellow humans to each other. The thought you would need to pay someone money just to make friends with them at school or be able to chat would be absurd, and you charging a classmate money to borrow an eraser would be just as outrageous unless you’re a greedy asshole to begin with.

But then there are inconsiderate people who fail to return things they borrow and not everyone seems to believe in the idea of sharing or community, or are only able to engage in such behavior to varying degrees. I’m not asking anyone to force themselves to share though. Those who don’t want to share aren’t going to change unless they fundamentally change their ideas regarding material things.

Moving on, I couldn’t imagine where I would be in five years, much less ten years in the future as a teen. Even at 33 I don’t really know what to say if asked the same thing today. There are things I want to do that I can do and things that just aren’t feasible for one reason or another. In retrospect, it seems I’ve been just going with the flow and haven’t made that many active decisions for myself regarding career and social life.

I’m quite certain I’ll still be in Japan practicing Aikido and maybe get in more time as an instructor if only to further my path as a learner. I don’t want to teach because I believe I’m a good teacher and know all the answers when in truth I don’t. Unfortunately, there are many who do what I just described and the students that follow them will just have to hope they chose the right teacher. I want to experiment with what I learned and explore how my body works internally and the kinds of results produced when interacting with others, and so on.

But other than Aikido, I feel like I haven’t really done anything I felt really mattered to me. The jobs I’ve held were just jobs I did to pay the bills and I hoped would offer experience that’d open up doors to something I actually wanted to do. Sometimes I hear people just get lucky and land the right job. Is there really such a thing as being fated to have a working life you’re dissatisfied with?

Fate, mother nature, and everything else that seems out of control is beyond our power to do anything besides prepare in advance to react, hopefully with positive results. Going to school, paying to learn skills from qualified instructors, is just something many do, not out of enjoyment, but rather to prepare for life working under someone and maybe one day working for themselves. This could be as a child or an adult looking to get “retrained.”

However, when it comes to work and life in society, I think I’m beginning to realize that just “going with the flow” means letting someone else make the choices for you. It’s just a form of passively reacting to what people in positions of power decide. This comes from over ten years of working and being managed by people who I’ve felt had no good idea of how to best utilize my potential except to satisfy their own vision of what the workplace should be like.

So many managers are blind to the true task of managing people. They don’t know how to foster individual growth within the organization to the benefit of the organization. They just have a set of directives they pulled out of their ass or got handed to them from further above (and further removed from the reality of work) to have set up. As long as things are working good enough and they’re not getting put on the burner, they’ll just run things the way that is most convenient for them.

I digress but if there’s any reason to get my hopes up for the future, it’s that I’ve finally learned enough from experience some things that weren’t taught to me in school or adults that should have been taught. Armed with knowledge I’ll be better able to assume command over my life and the way I use time so that I’ll be happier with what I find in return for my time and efforts.

I’m not getting younger even if I can retain some aspects of youth, such as inquisitiveness and physical fitness, through continued activeness and learning. All the baggage you carry with experience can be beneficial but also prevent you from looking at things with a fresh perspective.

I’ve got under three months to complete a transition to a career as a frontend developer. That’s the goal at least, but what I want to achieve is a lifestyle not constricted by office life and also be able to create something that can perhaps improve people’s lives. I’ll need to make a living first and I definitely want to be in a better position financially than I was before. I don’t want to keep making less and less money like I have each time I’ve changed jobs so far.

Perhaps I’ll find a way to give form to my passion for Aikido through the development of an app or some way for people practicing Aikido to better connect. That’s all in the future. Maybe five or ten years later? Maybe I’ll have my own family too or get to spend more time with people I care about instead of the lonely existence I lead living alone for over ten years. In recent years I’ve kept fish and house plants for company. Yeah.

Thanks for reading!