Ramblings of a Lost Man

This was written as a stream of consciouness. There is no real story thread to follow, just the collected thoughts of a very confused individual.

Recently, I’ve been struggling to find meaning and purpose in the work that I do. Whether this be coursework towards my Computer Science degree, programming side-projects, or even some of the YouTube videos that I film and put out. I haven’t been able to obtain the happiness that one only gets from doing work they really care about and are proud of.

This isn’t to say that I don’t care about the coursework I’m doing (well maybe) or the side-projects or my YouTube videos. Introspecting a little further, it becomes evident that I feel as if the work I am doing is not the best work I could be doing. I am performing at an adequate level, nothing more, nothing less. I am ok with this on the coursework front, I do what I need to do to get an A and throw in the towel because there is no need to strive for perfection. In terms of side-projects I’ve been working on, I am yet to launch a single one for public use because I feel as if no-one would want to use them. I am currently petrified of shipping these projects, even though I love the dopamine hit I get when I ship YouTube videos. I will discuss how I plan on overcoming this phobia in a little while.

YouTube. This is something I really want to do, yet I continuosly produce videos that are not as high quality as they could be, or as entertaining as they could be. I know I am capable of making better content, but I lack the discipline to actually make that content. Well, it could be a lack of discipline, or I feel as if the content ideas themselves aren’t interesting enough to deserve my editing, scripting, and filming time. I currently have three video ideas that I am semi-excited to make:

• Turning Secret Santa into a Graph Theory Problem
  • The game of secret santa and the underlying math, particularly relating to graphs is super interesting and I would love to dive deep into it for a nice animated video 3blue1brown style.
• Auto-Generating YouTube Video Transcripts
  • The idea of taking videos made by currently “famous” creators and feeding them in as training data to a machine learning model and getting new scripts in the style of a content creator would be very funny.
  • This would be a good meme, really fun to edit, and make for great clickbait by putting a big name creator in the title and thumbnail.
• Following Haruki Murakami’s Daily Routine
  • I’m interested in seeing what makes highly prolific creatives tick, and one of my favorites in modern times is Haruki Murakami.
  • I love his books.
  • I subconsciously know that rest, exercise, and eating good food will make me happier, healthier, more creative, and more fulfilled (this is the word I was searching for, I am not fulfilled). Yet, I do not follow habits that would encourage this in my own life.
  • I hope that by following an established creative’s schedule, I’ll be able to figure out what works.
  • Also, this would probably do well on the platform.

The video ideas I’ve listed above are ones that I do really want to work on, but I’ve been unable to make time to work on them. I know I have the time, but due to poor time management skills or a lack of attention span I have been putting off on these for a while. Allow me to push them back just a little bit more to Winter Break so I can finish this semester off strong and have a clear mind.

Back to my fear of shipping projects. I PROMISE to everyone reading this right now that I will ship something within the first three months of 2022. How do I plan on actually doing this? Well, I hope you guys remind me to ship and continually pester me. I’ll also be writing on this blog pretty frequently which will hopefully encourage me to post about what I’m building. That will put me into the shipping season mindset and help me cross the finsh (starting) line of putting a product out into the wild.

If you’ve read this far I applaud you for reading through my random stream of consciouness. Hopefully you gained some amount of entertainment from my ramblings designed to help myself think more clearly. If you want to talk about something cool then dm me on twitter @ sidcodes or email me @ sid at siddhantdubey.com.

— Siddhant Dubey. 11.30.2021