Promises, Commitments, and Resolutions

With the new year approaching, many minds are thinking forward about what they’re resolving to do in the upcoming year. It’s a tradition as old as time. People saying they’ll hit the gym, use less social media, go out to the movies more, and so on and so forth. Many of these never hold water, but it is the thought of wanting to improve themselves that counts.

As for myself, I can’t help but look back at the last month. By which I mean the traditional calendar and November, not this March that’s been 300+ days long. It was a joy to dust off this Medium blog and get back to writing, as writing used to be something I enjoyed. And then opportunity called, and it involved a commitment to a month-long assessment for a big paying tech gig in the financial sector. My personal commitment, writing a 1000-word blog post a day for a month, would have to wait. “It’s not like I get paid for those blog posts anyway, right?” I said to myself.

I didn’t get the job, but I never came back here to my little NaBloWriMo project. I was already a day behind when I started, and I was just in the mood to code more giving what I had just gone through. There may have been a bit of subconscious fretting over the fact that I know no one read these before and thus they have no intrinsic value, which is something I mused about before. But at the same time, I’ve always told myself that I hated leaving things unfinished.

That “hating leaving things unfinished” thing I tell myself, thinking about it, is clearly a lie. My Github and Bitbucket accounts are filled with repositories of applications and games that I’ve started and just abandoned. I have half of a first chapter of a silly sci-fi novel sitting in my Google Docs, and no motivation to even get that chapter done. I opted to change majors in college purely because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish my original major, and I have neither the money nor desire to try again with what I had started with. And I had attempted a 120-day streaming challenge on my Twitch channel only to abandon it a week in due to just getting depressed over the lack of immediate impact (see musings on unseen content being valueless, linked above). My ability to keep long-term commitments is questionable, at best.

I was actually musing about my own personal New Year’s resolutions recently, and the idea to try a 366-day streaming challenge surfaced in my head. The fact that my mind went there almost makes me wonder if I am motivated by my own self-loathing, since I had tried and abandoned a smaller version of that already during this long March. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, they say, and for some reason that idea must’ve been born from the insane thought that maybe this time I will actually draw a crowd and not hate myself from the lack of active viewers. It feels like me just perpetuating that lie of “hating leaving things unfinished”, since I have left X-day streaming challenges unfinished.

I still want to get my resolutions down in writing, thus the impetus for this post. And I’ve dawdled on getting to those for 5 paragraphs now, so let’s get into it.

1. Adopt a cat. This could be considered an aspirational goal right now, as I don’t exactly have a source of income currently. After all, why pledge to take care of another living being if you’re barely able to afford to take care of yourself? (Insert joke about late-stage capitalism here… though it might be impossible to embed the idea of late-stage capitalism in a Medium post.) But the companionship that my furry friends brought me when I was living with my folks was incomparable. I enjoy the independence of living by myself, but that constant companionship is definitely a missing element from my life.
2. Be healthier. I’ve definitely made strides in this compared to my time living with my folks. I’ve more or less stop buying sweets for myself, though this doesn’t exactly preclude anything that my friends and family give me as a gift. But I’m still largely eating a carb- and protein-heavy diet and not really doing anything to capitalize on it. I’ll have the occasional salad for lunch, but I definitely could afford to fit more fruits and veggies into my diet. I also wasn’t afraid to use the gym in my apartment complex until COVID hit, and after I’ve gotten the vaccine, I won’t be afraid of the gym again. (Well, I’ll give the vaccine a few weeks to work through my systems.)
3. Don’t stop looking for work. It’s easy for me to get discouraged when something doesn’t produce results. I spent years out of college trying and failing to find work until a good friend of mine handed my resume off to his boss. Just because I’m unemployed now, and just because I’m approaching 1 year of unemployment, doesn’t mean that things will repeat themselves. I have experience now, so things should be different, right?
4. Try to complete a 180-day (or more) streaming challenge. I know you’re thinking, “Didn’t you just say this would be the quickest way to drive yourself to suicide?” And, I didn’t use those words exactly… But really, I managed to get affiliate status on my Twitch channel, even if it was largely due to getting one big burst of viewers for one pseudo-Esports event. I feel obliged to try to grow my channel. I’ve heard from people more experienced than I that Twitch isn’t exactly a ground to grow in, as it isn’t exactly great with discoverability. In spite of that, I feel I should give it the old college try, right? If not for my channel, then to prove to myself that I can.