This blog post is based on the reflections that I have written in both of my second and third journals, the intentions of writing this very blog post are not to show that I had a good year but rather to show the lessons that I have learned throughout this journey.

This blogpost is not here to write about what are my goals for 2021 nor talk about the good stuff that I have done in 2020 but rather the things that I have learned in between, those hard lessons that really left an impact. If you are expecting some goals or plans then I am sorry, you can ask about them privately in a direct message or talk about them on a cup of coffee at Starbucks then I would have the honors to do so otherwise you can skip this blog post all together since it might/might not serve you any benefits.

I didn't write this blog post as a method of lecturing people or any of that sort, but rather as a note to myself to live and meditate on. I don't have an audience in mind plus I don't intend on having one in the first place. 

This blog post and the upcoming ones are not here to lecture you and tell you that the path I am on is the right path, but rather as a guide that you may or may not consider. As we all have different points of view and different ideas of life itself, you might see it in a different direction. Some might see these points as informative and helpful while some might think that it is a direct attack on them or conflicts with their morals and ego, it is your responsibility on how you see it since you are the judge of that.

I was and still hesitant about writing this blog post. Unlike the things I have written before from previously deleted blog posts along with the words and sentences that live in my journal, I am taking a new approach to everything: I am not going to write any of that.

I usually write about the good stuff in life that I have accomplished like reading 52 books, earning a certain certification, or getting lucky in life. Although the intentions are to share the good things and make a good impression/motivation for others yet I realized that I haven't taken into consideration the people around me and how they view it. Upon reflection and realization that I saw myself as a showoff, a self-centered asshole who only cared about himself, and I was trying really hard to impress the people around me without knowing that I have been doing it in an egoistic way or sometimes trying to prove that I am better than the people around me.

Hence I'll take a different route and just move on in life, those milestones are to prove to myself that I am moving on and progressing in life but not as a mechanism of showing off. It seemed that it doesn't bring any benefits but rather problems and pain.

Yes, I still fill my fountain pens using an ink bottle that I carry around in my bag.

Yes, I still stay at night writing code and do weird stuff.

Yes, I still journal and starting a new journal in these upcoming days.

Yes, I still organize my day in a separate notebook and structure my day, week, month, and year in sprints.

Those are not going to change but you probably don't care about them anyway so why sharing them in the first place? 

Trust me to ditch social media, it is not the real world

That world that you see online is not what you think it is, everyone is trying to show you the good parts of their lives but not the bad ones. We all have problems that we face on a day-to-day basis but we don't talk about them either it is forbidden/taboo or fearing that someone might mock/envy us.

The problem is that social media gives every single human on the planet a voice, but the issue is that not every voice is worth listening to. If you ever read The Odyssey by Homer, it explains the story of Ulysses who almost got killed by sea witches known as "The Sirens"

The Sirens pretend to be beautiful women with amazing voices, try to assure sailors, who pass their island, that they just want to entertain them with beautiful melodies. What they really want, however, is to kill them. Although Ulysses gave beeswax to his sailors to soften it and put it in their ears to prevent hearing those melodies as a gift from the goddess Circe, he ordered them to tie him completely to the boat just to see what Circe meant about those melodies. As he got enchanted by their voices, he demanded multiple times from his sailors to untie him so he can swim to them but upon arriving near the island, Ulysses saw two beautiful women combing their long golden hair, calling after him but what the sailors saw were two hungry monsters with crooked claws waiting for their next target.

Ulysses came back to his sense, later on, realized that he got saved from a catastrophe. The point of this story is that not everything you see or listen to is real on social media, and every single day we see more of those "Sirens" popping up.

Keep things to yourself more often and say that you don't know

We all have stories to share and ideas to spread but not everything we talk or share with might bring us any benefits. I have learned this lesson three years later where I shared my perspective about something three years ago with someone yet to find out that I got reminded by this person about it. Ashamed about the fact that this perspective was completely wrong but back then I thought I knew what I am doing, in reality, I wasn't at all.

if you don't know something don't make a hypothesis about it from your perspective nor come up with something completely different just to show that you are right. Say that you don't know, say that you will search for an answer and get back to it but give a genuine and authentic answer, don't bullshit on people.

It might give you a boost of ego for a small while but it will come back to you if things go south with this person, like Russian roulette: there is a 1/6 chance of being hit by a bullet, that doesn't mean that you won't die from it.

It is okay to do some mistakes if you are willing to admit that you did them

We all know this famous sentence of "It is not me man!!! I didn't do it!", I see it on a day to day basis not to forget that I have used it a lot in the past. It works for a while till you cry wolf the third time and find out that nobody will believe you anymore.

The process of growth starts from accepting our mistakes not by blaming others for them. Accept the consequences and move on, it will bring more shame not accepting the mistake than the mistake itself.

We all have things that we want to do in our lives but sometimes we might get distracted like a moth to a light bulb chanting "OHHHH SHINY OBJECT!" or we might be in a very bad position that anything that looks and seems good might be a trap or not worth it.

A lot of people approach me with their million-dollar idea, a plan for settling in Amsterdam if they have 10K$ in their pockets, and how bad and underpaying their current job is. But ironically we might have encountered some opportunities that might have helped in achieving this goal or task but we were afraid to do so.

We are so afraid that we call the people who did it lucky or plain bullshitters (depending on your perspective of life, you will be the judge of that). But if we took that extra risk then it might have yielded something better later on even if the current benefit might not yield much. 

I am not the kind of person who expects an "end of the road" in a tunnel in fact I am the kind of guy who doesn't expect an end in the first place, but I am a firm believer that one of those roads might lead to somewhere. It doesn't matter where but I would say that it is better than staying in the same place. You might not reach the end but at least the adventures are worth talking about.

So it is more about working on something to get it and not sitting on your butt expecting it to come to you on a plate of gold then I would encourage you and wish you luck on your long journey, and if you think about the law of attraction that this thing will come to you if you sat on your butt and thought about it all day long then good luck buddy.

"Most real failures are due to limitations which men set up in their own minds" - Napoleon Hill, Outwitting the devil

You don't have to buy expensive stuff to show everyone that you are rich, life is not about how many cars you have in your garage nor the furniture in your triplex apartment. You can live in a decent apartment and have a Honda Civic while being rich with seven figures and all.

Being rich is the ability to see the people you care about safe and sound, work on yourself by learning new things constantly, and stay on the morals and believes that you are raised on. It sickens my heart seeing the poor fooling themselves and others into buying things they can't afford to please people that don't care about them, because they know deep inside that they will never be those kinds of people and not in a million years.

The world doesn't owe you anything, so stop chasing things that were not meant for you. If you had everything that you truly need from the beginning then there shouldn't be a reason to go after the things that weren't meant for you, just to show and impress others that we have it.

Two years ago, I started journaling on a day to day basis. Sure, there are some days that I have missed but I sure wrote the hell out of those other days. Some were a couple of sentences while others are pages of ongoing events. Upon rereading those pages, I became more aware of myself and more conscious of my actions, I reached a position that I have done psychoanalysis on myself in full details which low key kinda interesting yet frightening.

Those pages grew to several books and as I am starting my fourth journal in the upcoming days, I realized a lot of things that I wasn't aware of myself. One of the things that I have discovered about myself is that I have what is called Hypergraphia which is a behavioral condition characterized by the intense desire to write constantly and on a day to day basis, the good thing about it is that it is the complete opposite of writer's block where I always have material to write about but it does have a bad part where it might go out of hand, and some notable people that have this condition are the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lewis Carroll. 

I can see myself in the third person when reading those journal entries, replaying those moments that I have lived before as if it is a simulation, and predict what to do next. In other words, I became aware of myself to a position that I am self-conscious (or some people say "being woke") of almost everything.

Identifying your strength and weak points is crucial to self-mastery, and when you are able to find out how the way your brain process ideas, you can use this to your advantage to learn almost anything in ease.

People with lies and ego leave, people with honesty and integrity stay

This will create some misunderstanding that I might be specifying a certain individual, but in reality, I am taking a more general approach to this. If you got triggered or affected by this then it might be something that you might have or have not done before with someone.

Lately, I have been canceling all my plans hanging out with others, even reaching a position of ditching those talkative yet annoying people with their useless gossip/conversations. I have obligations and work that I have to do in my life plus a real-life and career to focus on not to mention that lockdown is closing a lot of places hence there aren't that many options really. This canceling and ditching triggered certain people to a position of stopped talking with you altogether, unfollowing you/ blocking you/ ghosting you on social media to create a stand that they no longer care about you then talk behind your back as if they are the right ones.

Remember the part that I mentioned previously about social media that it gives voices to people but not all voices are right, well you know where I am heading on this.

The moral of this short paragraph is to show how ego takes over a human in unexpected ways, if they did this to you then they go "tough luck buddy! good luck finding someone like me!" mode but in reality, they did you a favor.

It is annoying to find some people in life disappear all the sudden but what really matters are the people that stay even if you don't talk/interact that much, they have already earned that friendship long ago so there is no reason for them to fight about it even if it means being with just three people, for it is better to have three people whom you trust than a thousand whom you don't.

There is still more to talk about but these are the lessons that I have learned throughout this journey, they might not be a lot but worth talking about. My journey is still at its beginning and there is so much to talk about later on.

I don't know where I might head towards but at least where I stand right now is in a better position than I was a couple of years before.

This is my thoughts of 2020 based on my journal entries

I’ve mentioned in the past that I will be taking breaks out of social media, I wouldn’t last more than 15 days but now I’ve decided to take this break for a long run.

I’ll start by writing the blog updates, then talk about the new journey that I am going to undergo, then mention why I am taking a break out of social media.

I have added a newsletter on the blog! You can find the submission form at the end of the post where I will be sending you one email every Monday of each week. 

Cancel anytime using the unsubscribe link inside of the email, there is an option to delete your email upon unsubscribing and download all the information related to you to provide more freedom over your information.

I have added a donation section at the end of the blog! You can donate from a small set of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, USDC, Dai, and Bitcoin Cash.

Donations are helpful in supporting this blog, it motivates and pushes me to write higher quality content for others to benefit along with buying equipment and software. My promise to my readers that I will never run ads at all and providing high quality content.

If you wished to support the blog, feel free to share and tag us! It will mean a lot.

To make it clear here, Transcendence has two meanings: Spiritual and Psychological. We’ll focus on the psychological part since this is the part that needs work on, whereas the spiritual part is covered. 

Transcendence is the realization that you are one small part of a greater whole, and acting accordingly. On a spiritual level, it means that you believe that God is above and beyond anything that exist in this world, no human can rival or claim to be of higher or similar level.

Transcendence on a psychological level is going towards a new level of development, it is the neglecting younger sibling of Actualization. I’ll use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to prove why it is vital.

For many years, Self-actualization dominated Maslow’s hierarchy, it is on the top of the hierarchy where below of it are esteem, love/belonging, safety, then physiological needs. Physiological needs are the bottom to prove how important it is for survival and the first step towards actualization and fulfillment. Maslow considered self-actualization the pinnacle of human development and the highest human need, it is the realization of one’s full potential. (In other words, you realize yourself when you are capable of finding out your true potential or the things that you excel at)

Self-actualization is indeed a goal worth development but self-transcendence is the next level. It is other-focused instead of self-focused and concerns higher goals than those which are self-serving.

Self-transcendence means transcending or expanding the individual self, meaning going beyond your own identity and understanding that you’re a small part of something bigger. The main reason that it is a difficult goal that requires hard work, due to the fact that you focus on others rather than yourself.

The journey starts by documenting my path in achieving this state, this is done by serving a purpose worth fighting for and ensure that others are benefitting from it.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self-s actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward - Viktor Frankl, Man's search for meaning

I have decided to decrease my online consumption to focus on the things that matter to me. Upon reading my reflections on my journals, I realized that social media played a huge role in my life where I have wasted a good amount doing nothing at all. 

There were days that I didn’t do a single task or learn anything useful, loafing at home doing nothing but scroll on social media after work. 

I realized that something off here and I want to address this issue. 

Here is my verdict towards social media in general:

I am not quitting all the sudden like that

The reason I can’t quit and move on is because there are benefits from social media, as in helping people in need.

I have received many messages from people asking for help on Facebook, Twitter, even Reddit. My posts and comments have shown  its effects to help others and made them pass the obstacles they were facing, I can’t stop like that.

A week ago from writing this blogpost, I got messaged by an 18 year old on Reddit who finished school and entering community college, he asked me how to start web development and what are the steps to get started. Like that, I felt this sense of appreciation and pride that my hard work paid off.

I have seen a lot of people online talk about doing a dopamine fast where they decrease their social media consumption to the absolute minimum for 30-40 days. The issue with this method that it is easy to relapse back to your old habits of scrolling through social media all day long because you give yourself permission to go back after that period.

The goal is to never get near to it as much as possible, there are other things in life that are more important than those platforms.

The constant hit of likes and notifications trigger our mind to release dopamine. We feel good for a short period, then we crave it more because we liked that good feeling that rushed into our minds, similarly to how a smoker feels towards cigarettes. The action itself can be harmful and we know about its effect yet that good feeling always want us to go back to it.

 The more notifications we get and the more likes we receive from posts and comments gives us a sense of prove that we are doing the right thing online, we are accepted as who we are, we are approved by this online tribe, more dopamine shots to our minds. 

 This never ending cycle is what called an “Infinite Dopamine Pool” (or “Infinite Pool” for short) since we can produce infinite amount of content and social media can show us infinite amount of content.

We feel special, we feel thought of by society, we feel that we are accepted and rightfully belong to this big online tribe that social media has created for us.

Yet again, we are lonely and friendless. How’s that? I have met people who have five thousand friends on Facebook yet no true friends.

The issue is that we can be who we want online, we can create a persona way different from who we are because we fear people judging our true selves, we create a character that fits perfectly in this online tribe not to be exiled. 

The moment we try to be real with people then get rejected for being ourselves, we create walls to protect ourselves and push that persona even more as a coping mechanism from being depressed. The more we get rejected, the higher the walls will become.

Deep inside, we don’t accept who we are unless we get approval from others and since our self is not approved of, we have to either get exiled from this big tribe or change ourselves to fit in.

Not everything you see online has to be real

I have mentioned in a previous blogpost that social media gives a voice to anyone on it, yet not all voices should be heard. You can drop fake information online and someone out of nowhere will accept what you are saying with the least amount of checking. 

The problem is that there is always a group of people who will accept and agree on what you say without checking at all. To them, it is a way to get back into the tribe if they were shunned out or reach to a higher position in the tribe’s hierarchy.

Even if they acknowledge that it is not right but if a group of people are doing it then they will have this feeling of missing out on an opportunity to shine in this tribe.

Lately, all social media platforms have turned to toxic environments. People ranting about anything that comes in front of them and shaming people for almost anything to make themselves look superior, powerful, or edgy.

As I mentioned before that people will believe anything they see online then they will fight anyone who proves them wrong. People hate to be proven wrong on social media since the evidence of their actions and mistakes will be marked  online forever.

If this person you are arguing with has a good amount of followers then they will be used as a pressure point to take you down. They will create fake news about you and cyber bully you to undermine and make you look weak online.

Let us say that things are going as intended in your life like you made a successful business or you have a wonderful family, people will start hating on you. You will be called out as fake, create fake allegations that your business is a fraud, create false information that you are having affairs against your marriage, and many more.

The problem is that not everyone wishes the best for the people around them. To them, life is unfair since they never got what they wanted. They will undermine successful people in society as a ‘getting even’ method rather than working on themselves to become better in life.

There is always that one person who claims: “I love to do [subject], but I don’t like to practice it”. It is evident that you could write that person off. As everyone knows, if you want to be [doer of subject/ profession], you have to practice it.

I call these people human spam. They’re everywhere, and they exist in every profession. They don’t want to pay their dues, they want their piece right here, right now. They don’t want to listen to your ideas; they want to tell you theirs. They don’t want to go to shows, but they thrust flyers at you on the sidewalk and scream at you to come to theirs. 

You should feel pity for these people and their delusions. At a certain point, they didn’t get the memo that the world owes none of us anything.

The world becomes all about them and their work. They can’t find the time to be interested in anything other than themselves.

This gets worse when you are dealing with a troll, and those people come out of nowhere and popup in unexpected place.

A troll is a person who isn’t interested in improving your work, provoking you with hateful, aggressive, or upsetting talk. You will gain nothing by engaging with these people. Don’t feed them, and they’ll go away.

The rise of fake influencers and fake gurus

I want to be clear in this section that I am not targeting someone specific, this is my two cents on the whole situation. There are legit influencers and gurus who are helping the community achieve certain milestones but I am mentioning the bad apples from the good ones here.

All the sudden you start seeing those influencers on Instagram pop out of nowhere posting life tips, advice on how to get rich quick with drop shipping/stocks or forex day trading/selling useless courses, advice on how to quit your 9 to 5 job along with becoming your own boss, and how to become famous online.

Everybody wants to get rich quick, everyone wants to escape the rat race, everyone wants to become their own boss, and everyone wants to become famous online, what do you do? Sell courses on how to achieve this.

Just because it worked out for certain people, it doesn’t mean that it will workout for everyone. But people want to get rich without doing any effort, the ones who are making the money are the people who are doing these tricks and selling you those services by click funneling and upselling you to buy things that it will never work.

Try telling them that the only way to get rich requires hard work, loads amount of time, a realistic product or service, and those courses are a scam and they won’t work, you will be cyber bullied by their loyal fans in a matter of minutes. Try asking for the numbers, high chance either you will get fake numbers or no response at all.

The world is a vast yet beautiful place, it has a lot things you can do. Activities like going out bungie jumping or hiking, reading, writing, traveling (although the covid situation made it hard but in the future), meet interesting people, try foreign foods and drinks, and many more.

You don’t get to this online, life is not bound to a screen. I work the majority of my time in front of a screen, I return back home to check social media on my phone till bed time then the cycle repeats itself.

I realized that this life is not worth living for. I can do much more than that, I started to read and write on a daily basis. It is odd for someone who work in the technical world telling you to decrease your screen time to the absolute minimum, like I use a physical notebook as a planner to write my tasks for the day because I know if I used an app to schedule my tasks for the day, I will start doing things that I shouldn’t be doing like searching on Google “Why the toilet flushes in the opposite direction in Australia” (no jokes search for it, this is something real and debated about but you should be doing in your free time).

You can be you without changing or approval from others

I've added two new features to the blog and taking a break out of social media

This is probably the 5th if not 6th time redoing the blog but I have a legit reason this time

the previous blog was created using a Gatsby template which served its purpose but adding one thing or removing something was somewhat of a pain so I decided to take matters into my hand and redo it from scratch.

The Gatsby template relied on a git-based CMS called Forestry (tho the UI of Forestry is lit 🔥  and I really liked it) but it is time to move to a new CMS! so I chose Prismic which offered a very generous free tier (and an actual client library to mess around with 🤷‍♀️)

I went beyond the edge and used Nextjs and Tailwind, rewrote the entire thing from scratch even though I have postponed the development of the site for quite some time (exactly 3 months, it should have been finished 3 months ago but anyway)

This is a beta version of the site, there are a lot of things that needs modifications and a lot of features coming on the way but for a starting point it is not bad

you can access this admin section and post whatever you want! no restrictions no boundaries whatsoever!

Better SEO, Better analytics, Better tagging

in the previous template, it lacked SEO to a point that any blogpost pointed to nowhere. This time I have written the SEO tags according to the standards so they should appear on Facebook, Google, and Twitter as expected.

The site now uses Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics as expected, this functionality is also written from scratch whereas the previous site relied on a Gatsby plugin (and it was performing poorly)

This version of the blog is optimized for performance and speed, although it is still in beta mode the results are not so bad after all! There is more room for improvement but as a starting point, it is not that bad.

2020 was tough, I stopped blogging for quite some time to focus on the things that mattered the most. Now that I have recreated the blog and starting to have a little bit of time on my hand, I might dedicate around 30 mins to write more.

I used to write a blogpost and spam it on Facebook, even though some might be interested yet the majority aren't so I have decided to post it on the Facebook page and some subreddit groups on Reddit where it reaches the right people. I might utilize the Instagram page to add the blog posts there as well.

As for the content, I have made a promise in the past that I will deliver high-quality content and I am still on my promise.

here are the upcoming features that I have in mind for the next update:

Newsletter (serverless, secure, and always on the first day of the month but also made from scratch)

Support page (if you felt that the blog is benefiting you and you wish to support it)

Book recommendations page (separate thing and it can be included in the newsletter)

Contact page (plans is to make a Slack bot not emails which are easier for me to manage)

rewrote the whole thing from scratch, but this time it is quite different! I promise

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