For the past month i have been avoiding AI engineering stuff, personally i think i had a crazy burnout plus the circumstances weren’t favourable for me to do something that hard, i was on a body recomposition so i had very little energy left in me to study and be productive, so when i tried to study i just couldn’t i had a hard time doing things, like imagine doing 15k-20k steps every day (except leg day) and doing workouts 5 days a week, that is absurd and now do that for 2 months yeah that’s what i was on while i did have time to do my studies but i was just lacking motivation to do it
If you had tried anything like this then you know for the fact that you are emotionally overwhelmed all the time and at that point of time incidents that i mentioned in “How to Deal with Evil/Irrationality” happened and even though that was a very tough time (facing emotional burnout, physical burnout, a fucking existential crisis and the demons from the past at the same time).
So yeah I would say it was a pretty tough time most of it, I brought it upon myself, let me say it I didn’t want to quit so I kept up with the workout but AI engineering stuff I couldn’t do it at all, I tried doing it and made a small amount of progress, which was not so futile but my brain was trying to hold everything together and it couldn’t and at some point I just gave up on learning new things because I was agonizing over trivial topics that would have taken me merely a few minutes to understand.
I stopped learning AI stuff at all, the learning part was on hiatus, I didn’t know when to start again and frankly I didn’t want to, so I didn’t, I let my hiatus go on for too long because, I knew i am not the same old underconfident guy anymore, after some time when a lot of those struggles that I mentioned earlier were gone i still didn’t begin getting my shit together, I had become complacent. But here’s the thing: you cannot turn your head away from these things for too long of a time.
One day, when I was just scrolling through Twitter, I found a motivational post that went like, “THE rock bottom isn’t a rock bottom; it’s a trampoline that launches you.”
When I read that quote, I had a realization in my mind, a scary one: I am not at rock bottom anymore. I have something; for the first time in my life, I am not at rock bottom.
I have surpassed the launch phase of the trampoline, and the place that I stand now The trampoline isn’t there no more. I would have to continue normally, and if I am not moving forward, I am going backwards.
Having realized this, I knew I had to do something. I can’t go back to being what I was; I am starting to get my life in order and do my stuff again.
The blues of realizing the time that I have wasted doing absolutely no learning are still there, and I am still processing that feeling, but there is still hope because I’m back to Sisyphus.