Identity on ~/signaldrift

losing yourself

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 10:21:50 +0000

When I think about your daily life at home, you’re essentially an emotional servant to your family (much like me in mine in many ways), and you maintain that by cannibalizing your autonomy. This is why you feel you aren’t a person of your own, but rather your dad’s + sister’s accessory when they need you, and a working robot otherwise (either working for the wedding project or for your job, they’re similar from the perspective of how your mind feels about the responsibility)

who

Thu, 30 May 2024 23:50:20 +0000

I find myself constantly grasping for something because I’m deeply dissatisfied with who I am. I think I want to be a certain person and I don’t think I am that person. Or maybe in my head I see myself as that person but I recognize externally I’m not that person. That’s why I have all these projects and things I try to do that are beyond my reach, why I spend most of my waking time consumed by different things that don’t relate to my job or my day to day life. I’m searching for some sort of meaningful thing that I want my life to be about, but even I recognize that likely isn’t how life works. Almost every waking moment when I’m alone and not doing my job or doing survival upkeep, I’m researching things online. I go down several YouTube and Reddit rabbit holes every day, usually on some technical topics I convince myself I’m interested in. Or I’m drafting up project ideas that, if I actually managed to do, would make me the person who I think I want to be.

dissociated

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 22:25:48 +0000

Between 5:30 and 7:30 today I did a lot of thinking and it feels like I came to some conclusions.

The first was that I’m happy to stick with a data-related career. And I think I still want to aim to end up as a machine learning engineer that primarily does ML system architecture (it’s okay if these words mean nothing, it’s not important). Why this is an important revelation is because now I can let go of the idea of doing embedded dev (similar to what Dhruv and Andrew do I think) as a job and just focus on progressing in the realm I’m currently in. I’m still interested in it, but I think it’ll be better for me to do it as a hobby.