29th October 2021
It’s (the end of) half term, which means literally nothing gets done at all because everyone’s at home and you’re still expected to do things whilst everyone else gets a week off. It feels like bringing a laptop to a party, or rather, the party turning up to the library, not respecting the peace and quiet that people need in order to actually focus. You’re forced to listen to stupid podcasts, mainly by people having loud conversations RIGHT NEXT TO YOU, yet they have the nerve to say to everyone “shut up, she’s studying”. Maybe follow your own advice, that’d be nice for once. I’d stick in some headphones, but I’ve just had a shower, and I don’t want anything bad happening, maybe I might do it in order to drown out the noise, but then again, I don’t want to risk it, so instead, I’m bashing my keyboard as loud as I possibly can, maybe that will work.
Having to work through half term should be illegal. You’re already burnt out, and you need a week to recover, but waiting all the way until Christmas is going to be a very long wait, not to mention living in a very loud household where time goes out of the window and everything is just chaos, so you literally cannot focus at all, even if your life depends on it. Put some music on, and you’re convinced that someone is calling out your name, as well as ending up focusing more on the music rather than the task at hand. Don’t put any music on, and all you can hear are the conversations that you’re involuntarily a part of. Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. You can’t bloody win at all when it’s half term. You might as well take the week off. You deserve it.
I mean, the only productive thing I did this week was create a handful of spreadsheets. At least that’s something, right? Well, when it’s half term, you can’t do much anyway. Why can’t universities just embrace the idea of a half term, like how schools and colleges do? It’d make life a lot more easier, and at least I’d be able to have a week to myself, where there aren’t really that much responsibilities and I don’t have to attend anything at all.
Okay, rant over. I’ve got a glimmer of peace and quiet. A bit of room to actually breathe. I need to understand the concept of prices and how to price things because I don’t want to undersell myself nor rip anyone off. I need to understand the market that I’m trying to get into. I need the market to reflect me as a person, who I am, and what my philosophies are (in short, to just fucking end capitalism because I’ve had enough of it, and I’m sure everyone else has had enough of it as well, but to end it once and for all is a very lofty goal, so a bit at a time), because if I don’t do that, I’m only lying to myself, and that will most definitely show through. I’m still straddling between two ideas, as well as being in a bit of a dilemma about something as arbitrary as figuring out which tools I need to use in order to do the job.
I’m really tempted to just do my original idea because it seems the most interesting, and is something that I think the world needs a bit more of. Surely, there’s an audience for it, right? I don’t care if it’s literally for an audience of one. I’d rather have one person really love the business idea (well, a handful of people liking it would be nice), over thousands, if not millions, of people to not really give a damn about it. To be honest, I feel more at home in the smaller communities than I’ve ever felt in the corporate world, because at least those communities feel personal, as well as feeling like how communities are supposed to feel, where the corporate world is basically everything to everyone. I find the smaller stuff (especially the obscure niches that are hard to find within plain sight) much more intriguing, because it’s something that I’ve discovered by myself, for myself, not because it was advertised to me by some algorithm which absolutely loves to build a character out of me by collecting all of my personal data and selling it onto third party advertisers, just so that I can glance at their stupid ads with glazed over eyes.
I find the corporate stuff too stifling, and I know for a fact that I find it hard to fit in. You have to conform to unspoken rules without questioning it (in this case, it’s the ever changing algorithms that you have to be aware of), and claim to be different (just like everyone else) because it’s the hot new marketing buzzword or whatever. I don’t want to exist on mainstream social media anymore. I’ve had enough of it.
LinkedIn’s a goddamn circlejerk littered with quiet advertising (in this case, “quiet advertising” is someone who works in graphic design or marketing coming up with an ad for some corporate brand (it’s always gotta be a corporate brand rolls eyes intensely), but it’s so minimal, it feels like a full stop without a sentence), and stupid engagement bait posts as well as lots and lots and lots and lots of BS.
Twitter’s just politics and startup/entrepreneur/tech bros waving their dicks at each other by building in public (or in this case, bragging in public), as well as obsessing at how many vanity metrics (likes, followers, retweets etc THE LOT) they have and writing arbitrary blog posts in threads of all things (basically having a thread of 50 tweets about why Javascript is literally the best thing ever, when it could literally be a blog post), along with digital artists jumping onto the NFT/cryptocurrency bandwagon (which I’m so sick and tired of hearing about, and as a person who works at the intersection of art and technology, I refuse to do NFTs because it’s just a fancy way of money laundering with fantasy money where the value of it goes up and down a lot, and basically getting a mortgage to purchase a JPEG is just absolutely ridiculous, but no one seems to bat an eyelid since they’re all so entranced in the wonders of web3 that they’re not aware that it’s well and truly going to ruin the world, like they give a damn).
Instagram’s a vanity contest, a bit similar to high school, which is ironic since I’ve been on Instagram since high school, and is some neverending treadmill rat race thing where if you don’t keep up with it, you’re just going to fall right off it. I’ve fallen right off it, and at this point, I don’t want to get back on it because it seems like too much effort, not to mention that it’s owned by Facebook.
Don’t get me started on Facebook (also now known as Meta, as of yesterday) since that company deserves its own special level of hell for all the things it’s done as well as ruining the internet along with its attempts in turning life into one big MMORPG and convincing everyone that’s real life, when clearly it’s not, since zucc is clearly pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes (just in the form of VR headsets).
Well, what are the alternatives then? Good old fashioned ways of doing things, but doing them in ways that won’t seem outdated to a modern audience, and being a part of smaller communities that you actually feel a part of.
Anyway, my momentum has been ruined because my sister needed help logging into her Roblox account, so I can’t rant anymore, and this is why I hate having to do things through half term, as well as having to use mainstream social media platforms in all their big corporate ugliness simply because everyone else is on there. To be honest, I’d rather go down the road less travelled. It seems a lot more interesting that way, and I think it’d be good for business even though I’ve realised that I’m not a capitalist at all. The world’s already messed up thanks to capitalist billionaire cult leaders who encourage others to do the same, and I don’t want to add to it.
This week’s reflection is brought to you by angry sleep deprived half term chaos (I can’t wait to get my own room, it’s almost done, and the sooner I move in, the better), so I hope next week’s a bit better, but I won’t hold my breath on that, and I’ll just go with the flow since planning almost never works.