Journaling In Lieu of Therapy
And the solution to parenthood, Coppola's big bust, and the engineering job market
Everyone seems to be going to therapy nowadays.
At a dinner last week, a few of my friends asked me why I wasn’t in therapy. I didn’t have a good argument for why not, but after thinking about it, I’ve come to realization I solve most of my problems by simply writing them down.
Last month I celebrated almost 20 years of “digital” journaling. Halfway through second grade, I opened a word document and literally wrote down a stream of thoughts.
Wednesday, 2006, March 1st, 9:44 PM
So, not lot of time to type up my diary. This is my start, parents calling me to go to bed soon though. I think they want to know what my password is. I had a pretty bad day today. >.<, way too much math homework. All this stuff is in my brain at once, and we have a QUIZ tomorrow. Mr. Scott is cool but he’s way too hard on us. I’m being engulfed in all these chats and stuff, I must be popular =). I’m not going to write too much in here, just what’s happening, mucho better than my other diary in my sis’s bedroom. I have a password too which is going to be somewhere else if I forget it. I must put another code thing. This is my LIFE, probably not though. I liked that doodle thing with Vincent. Parents, today my dad helped me with math. BADDDDDDDDDDD. Argh, I hope tomorrows gonna be a better day then today. Please no test.
Since then, the only thing that’s really changed has been some improved grammar.
Over the last 20 years I managed to journal at least a few times a month. Re-reading through the years, I got a perspective that while my problems continued to change, the emotional intensity stayed the same.
At the end of the day, my journal never spoke back or gave me any real advice. But having an outlet that was not judgmental and could help release my emotions was what I needed. I would type in it while drunk in college getting over a sentimental break-up. And rage at it in high school when I played badly in tennis. And nowadays, every morning I’ll write through a journaling template that takes items off of my mind for the rest of the day.
I remember reading a quote from a famous author that was something along the lines of “I write down my thoughts so I don’t have to bother other people about it”. And ever since then, I’ve tried to keep to it.
This newsletter, of course, is the exception.
Things to Share
Haley Nahman from Maybe Baby writes about Parenthood’s PR problem. Having kids has never been viewed as easy, but that’s becoming more of an issue as U.S. birth rates hit historic lows. Since I’m in my 30s now, I’m beginning to see my friends split into a bi-modal groups of either "I want to be a super parent” or “Kids don’t make sense because I can’t be a super parent”. Andrew Wilkinson makes the argument that the easiest solution is to start ignoring your kids, in order to bridge the gap and not create such high expectations for parenthood. As a whole, the human race has been having kids and re-populating the earth since the beginning of time. And yet technologically we should be living in a time where it’s the easiest to actually have and raise kids given the reduced risk in infant mortality and advanced healthcare. So I wonder if the present memetic nature of “what I have to sacrifice to become a parent” will be the downfall for generations to come.
A quick primer on Francis Ford Coppola the entrepreneur by Trung Phan is worth reading after seeing the tremendous box office flop of Coppola’s latest film: Megalopolis. It’s weird to see the same entrepreneur that can turn a side project of selling Napa Valley wines into a $300 million dollar business not understand that his eccentrically artsy and mystical $120 million dollar self-financed film won’t blow up in his face. I’m reading Elon Musk’s autobiography at the same time and can see the similarities in how entrepreneurs put all the chips on the table for their passion projects. And over enough iterations maybe it evens out? For Coppola, maybe the volatility doesn’t matter given he’s turning 86 next year.
Gergely Orosz from The Pragmatic Engineer shares the State of the software engineering job market in 2024. At Interview Query, we have a pulse on the job market by nature of our industry and are also seeing a slow uptick in jobs in 2024 after the crazy layoffs post-ZIRP in 2023. But more interesting is the engineering job growth graph. With only just one year of decline in tech jobs, almost every coding bootcamp has been completely wiped out and thousands of new grads + tech job seekers are feeling the squeeze of a “bad economy”. This begs the question: is this more of an effect of failed ed-tech and university business models or is this a sign of the future of AI and automation to come?
