2018 was a big year for me.
I graduated college, left Michigan, and set values that will change the course of my life.
As I left the people who I regarded as my closest friends for the last four years, I knew it was time for drastic changes.
I decided to work out regularly. I’ve been scrawny for all of my life, and I wanted to protect my body from future injury, relieve stress, and better myself. I gained 18 pounds over two months of working out.
I’m refining my screen time. I added an app to track my phone screen time and the first report made me sick to my stomach. I was spending hours a day on apps that gave me little value, mindlessly scrolling through feeds of many people I didn’t know well. I realized that this was the start of “keeping up with the Joneses”, where people post the highlight of their day or month to elicit envy from others. This is why many people experience lifestyle inflation after college, when they are spending money they may not have to impress people they don’t particularly like.
I’m spending my time commuting and at work (when possible) listening to podcasts and books instead of music. I absolutely love music, but most of the time I’m not learning anything new. Instead, I’m binge listening to finance and economics podcasts, preparing for my future so I can learn from other’s mistakes.
I started learning Spanish. Human’s minds have incredible plasticity, and apps like Duolingo provide opportunities for daily practice to learn new languages to communicate with people with whom I otherwise wouldn’t be able to get to know.
I started practicing a mild form of minimalism. While I haven’t sold everything that doesn’t fit in my backpack, I’ve recognized how few material items really bring me value in life. I don’t need 5 pairs of shoes, the newest Iphone, or apple Airpods. When I started to declutter my life, I found myself enjoying the small things in life more rather than looking to buy my happiness from my Amazon shopping cart.
I’ve found a satisfaction from work that I never found in school. While I’ve felt this feeling completing manual labor or after writing a good story, following meaningless directions in college brought little of it. Creating value and delivering a product is the essence of capitalism, where companies compete to best please customers and employees compete to please supervisors.
At a time when many people my age experience depression after leaving “the best years of their life”, I’ve recognized that it’s not so.
Life is what you make of it, and habits are the foundation of life.