The benefits of lonely summers
How to take advantage of an isolated life
I had lots of lonely summers due to COVID and joblessness in recent years. I didn’t have many friends in my hometown. I exhausted all the Netflix shows I was interested in and already responded to my social media. I stopped talking to people. Yet, I didn’t feel lonely but creative and inspired. Why?
First, there wasn’t much social distraction. I usually turned off my social media because I didn’t have much incentive to interact with many people I didn’t meet anyway. I was more on who I wanted to be rather than what the society/friend circles wanted me to be. My deep reflection journey usually started after I deleted my social media.
Second, it was boring. Sometimes I felt bored to death, but usually, the boredom simulated creative thoughts. The river I jogged was my idea lab. I would start feeling a surge of energy to create something I had never thought of.
Third, the time chunk became big. There weren’t scheduled events, such as going to class or meetings. Since I didn’t need to be productive or limit my time on something, I could fully immerse myself in the learning and experiments I wanted to do.
My life usually involves three parts: reading, creating, and writing during these times. Reading gives me meaningful inputs; writing allows deeply processing and designing experiments to test my reflection.
The unique environments and my action bring me three benefits:
Write: Upgrade of self-understanding
I can self-reflect on my daily life when I’m around people, but it’s hard to think deeply when I’m constantly affected and distracted. I wrote down what I learned about myself, such as principles.
Read: Think deep and big of the world
The intrinsic curiosity will finally drive me. I stop thinking of utility but big questions related to history, technology, and humanity through reading. It gives me a sense of who I am as a human, why I behave, and who I can potentially be.
Test: Experiment with creative ideas
I have all the big-time chunks to experiment with within my life. I can learn one subject 6 hours a day while having time to reflect and improve on what I’ve learned. More ideas are discovered and implemented since having more energy to monitor my learning process.
Write: Upgrade of self-understanding
Taiwan Survival Guide
In 2020 summer, I created a Taiwan Survival Guide because I had no friends and was in bad situations with my family. I gathered some solutions with past experience that helped me.
How to self-learn as a lazy person
I also wrote an article on how to self-learn as a lazy person. As a lazy person, I figured out a way for myself to self-learn rather than self-blame. That’s also why my lonely summertime could be fruitful because I understood myself enough to motivate my learning experience.
Relationship Principles
This summer, besides updating old Life Principles, I reflected on and created my Relationship Principles. I made toggles for life events when aligned or misaligned with the principles and their corresponding results.
Read: Think deep and big of the world
Reading
I read a lot in the 2020 summer. Books fundamentally transformed my worldview and value system. I could start asking big questions such as, what’s the future of technology? How to strategize my life? What’s the special about being a human?
10-year vision
It enabled me to establish my 10-year-vision. The moonshot mindset still inspired me, and my goals kept me reflecting on my changes over time.
I noticed that intellectual stimulus hadn’t aligned enough with my daily life. My next step would be combining my understanding of myself and the world with how I live my day.
Test: Experiment with creative ideas
2-min journal
In 2019, I created the 2-min journal template, which drastically increased my awareness of my learning and gave me satisfaction in daily life.
Co-living learning experiment
In 2020, I experimented Co-living Learning Experiment, in which I invited different friends to live in my hometown and learn together for a few days. The motivation was to solve my loneliness problem and create learning for people.
My emotion observations
In 2021, after reading lots of mental health & relationship books, such as Attached, The Choice, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, and The Happiness Trap, I observed my emotions from 1 min to 50 hours after a fight with my friend. I realized I didn’t have enough growth mindset for my relationship and used them to develop my relationship principles, such as controlling emotional impulses.
Creative Machine Learning Project
I also spent a week finishing a one-month machine learning class on Udacity. Beyond coding, I also created a quick presentation for my work, interviewed for feedback, and made a funny voice-over for the Customer Segmentation Project. I learned that I could be so productive and self-driven if I got great feedback and found exciting ideas.
Self Congratulation!
In 2020 summer, I wrote myself a 10-year vision. I’m only 24 now, but I think I achieve my goal for my 25-year-old! After getting into Meta, I’m confident in my work value in the market, and my family respects me so much more.
I felt grateful for my past self, who built meaningful blocks on each other every summer. Even though so many peers around me got great jobs in big companies during summer vacation, I never felt inferior. Now, I got to know more about myself, the world, and execution. Hence, I felt much less anxious about my future, had fewer doubts about my choice, and had more confidence in what I could do. My summer lonely experience didn’t discourage me but grounded me and directed my future life.
Suggestions for my future
I’m afraid this environment will be hard to replicate when I’m trapped in many duties. Therefore, I want to have a time point every year for a retreat with no social distraction, full of boredom, and have a complete-time chunk for at least a week. I’m thinking of not actively looking for a job right after graduation but having this kind of isolation to process deeply instead. Besides, I will be in Taiwan every year to see my family, and it will be a good time.
To expand the opportunity to read, write, and test, I want to test it out this summer internship. I will carve out a chunk(morning, afternoon, evening) once a week to write what’ve I learned, what questions I have, and what to test out. For reading, I will attempt to read every day before going to bed. This is my next experiment, so please note the progress as you(my future self) go.
For integration between the worldview and my daily life, I can start small by putting one idea of the book into action. It’s impossible to merge human and machine brains from A Thousand Brains, but I’m still applying Good Strategy Bad Strategy. What small ideas can I try from every good book? How do I see it connect with my value and thoughts, or how can I even some more questions I personally care about from books?