The last couple of days, while listening to music, I realized that the volume was significantly lower than usual.
It’s not just the volume - I’m unsure how to describe it, but it was like I was listening to someone play music in a room, far away.
Today, I finally lost it. For days, I thought I had water in my ears, or earwax made me feel deaf.
I noticed I only felt this way about a few songs I was listening to. What did they have in common?
That’s when I noticed the f**king Dolby Atmos symbol.
“How to turn off Dolby Atmos Spatial Audio”, I typed.
And just like that, I could listen to music again. Like usual.
Apologies for the clickbait-y title. And intro.
But yeah, I did have a point I was trying to make. Everything gets so much easier when you shift your perspective from complaining about problems, to actually fixing them.
…And in order to fix problems, you need to reflect on what’s going wrong.
So, here’s me doing that:
(a) Similar to the story I just narrated, I think I took way too long to act on my feelings. I spend a lot of time living in my head, and playing out possible scenarios of what would happen if I finally started “doing”.
I got my first Discord account in late 2017, because a friend of mine from Animal Jam wanted to talk about something personal. The game’s annoying chat filters prevented them from doing so.
In about a week, I grew bored of the same friend, but I didn’t get bored of Discord. I found it insanely cool that I was able to talk to people all around the world with similar interests. But what stood out to me most was the absence of chat filters. The era of cursing finally began.
For almost three years, the only servers I joined were Animal Jam servers. Was Animal Jam the most important aspect of my life? No.
Ever since I was ten-years-old, I dreamt of studying abroad, and doing “something” related to math. Then why did I make absolutely no attempt to connect with people who had similar goals to me, instead of picturing a fancy life I was nowhere close to working toward?
Sure, I did google information about these schools on various instances, and random bouts of “Oooh I wish I could escape the boredom that is school right now!”, but I genuinely don’t think that was enough.
I think theme spread across various other aspects of my life as well. I took too long to tell people how I felt about them, bad or good. I took too long to get started on learning higher mathematics. I took too long to watch the shows I wanted to watch. I took too long to start finally listening to Panic! At The Disco (who just announced they’re splitting up today)
(b) For a good portion of my school life, I lived under the delusion that only the “smart” people were interesting.
I did know that it was very rare for the school topper to actually be the smartest person in the class, but I did believe that anyone who was remotely intelligent could do decent in school with little effort. I thought befriending every “smart” kid at school was a great idea, and would increase the probability of finding “my person”.
Doing so, I barely made connections with a ton of other people who seemed interesting in retrospect. The kid who kept interrupting class with his humor. The kid who was so tall, yet sat on the first bench so no one could see the board. The kid who drew on every school book in existence. Why were they the way they were?
Unfortunately, I have absolutely no idea.
Spoiler: I never found “my person” at school.
(c) If anyone met me during middle school, one thing would immediately become clear: I was obsessed with reading.
When J.K. Rowling released Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, I had to be the first person to get it. When Stephen King released new books, I had to be the first person to get it. Nothing was going to stop me from reading.
But like every other form of entertainment, I believe there should be a cap on how much anyone reads. Parents tell kids not to play too many video games, or not to watch too many movies, but I have never heard of someone telling their child to stop reading.
Looking back, I think I shouldn’t have spent as much time reading as I did.
Don’t get me wrong: I would never say someone shouldn’t read. The time I spent reading has definitely affected the way I write, and the intuitive “flow” I have while writing.
Just like other similar forms of entertainment, I do think that reading too much results in someone being way too idealistic, and forgetting to live in the real world. Personally, I don’t think reading gave me the same experience I had while talking to people online, through games or Discord.
Also, I think I should have been more mindful of when I was reading. I’m not sure if I would call “every free period of school” a good time to read.
Perhaps if I didn’t have my face covered in a book all day, I would have appeared more sociable (although I’m not sure if I missed out on much by not socializing at school).
During those years of middle school where I spent a lot of time reading, I barely watched too many shows, or spent a lot of time playing Animal Jam as much as I wanted to. Maybe I missed out on conversations that would have opened up my worldview.
(d) I probably couldn’t apologize for this enough, but I am genuinely very sorry that I kept laughing at people for giving wrong answers in class, or saying things that I thought were flat-out dumb.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think that a lot of things that people said were stupid. But I shouldn’t have stooped below my level and laughed at them.
Notice that I said “a lot of things” that people said were stupid, not all of them. For example, I didn’t have to laugh at people who messed up when answering a question about the similarity of triangles.
At the time, I did it in order to fit in, and gain a certain someone’s friendship.
After I left school, I’ve grown a lot emotionally, and worked with people all over the world on projects, classes, problem sets, and whatnot. I’ve definitely had my share of short-circuit moments - I know for a fact that I would have felt terribly discouraged if someone made a bigger deal about it than they should have.
These days, I’ve been reading a lot on perspectivism, and how it’s important that we have multiple perspectives in scientific research. How are we supposed to get those multiple perspectives if we discourage everyone “different” or “incapable” (by our very subjective definition) of pursuing science?
And how do I live with myself if I’m the person going against the philosophy I believe in?
(e) This might come off the wrong way, but I wish I got in trouble more often.
No, no, I don’t want to go back to my school days and purposefully taunt teachers. I just want to go back to my school days and speak my mind, more times than I did.
What do we get in trouble for at school? Off the top of my head, I’m thinking about: not bringing the required materials to class, questioning a teacher, backanswering (notice how there’s a problem with both questions and answers), laughing/talking in class.
I’m sure a couple of us are capable of getting in trouble for way more niche things, but hey, let’s stick to the classics? After all, not everyone can break lab equipment en mass.
Something in common with much of this, in India at least, is the whole adult-child dynamic, and lack of child rights as a whole. We like our freedom fighters because they gave us our rights. I should have done the same thing and fought for my rights, but I never did. Instead, I may have sneered at the people who voiced out their thoughts.
I think a lot of people who choose to be “disciplined” at school mooch off those who do raise their opinions. If I could go back, I would stop making my classroom an echo chamber, and create more conflict.
(f) Why. Did. I. Participate. In. So. Many. Competitions. Thankfully, much of this only applied to 9th grade, but in general, why did I spend so much time writing a bunch of pointless tests? I recently applied to college, and I swear I didn’t put 95% of the awards I got as a result of taking these exams in my college applications.
Some of these tests gave me a false sense of pride when I did well. In fact, one of the reasons behind my spam-registering for tests in 9th grade was because I believed that writing more tests would mean more probability of succeeding, and therefore more external validation for my intelligence.
Sure, one could argue that this was a coping mechanism I had to develop in order to make up for the fact that I was never validated by school.
But honestly, what a waste of time. It would have been so much better if I started my Discord addiction era earlier, spoke to people who were interested in mathematics, thereby finding out that I know absolutely nothing. Instead, I kept feeding from the source - the small amount of pride eventually grew to a large balloon that was easily pricked by one terrible competition result in 2021.
(g) (Controversial) I tried way too hard to make female friends.
It became very clear at an early age that most of my friends were boys. When I was in 4th grade, I deflated my math and computer science scores in order to fit in with the girls. Needless to say, this easily busted in 5th grade.
Toward the end of 5th grade, I met someone who I believed would end my era of having to play pretend. This person explicitly told me one they that they preferred the personality I put on when I played pretend in public. That was the end of that.
To this day, I see the fact that I don’t have close female friendships, and struggle to make bonds with girls, as a negative. Talking to people about this makes me come off as “weird” (especially since I’m female), or as a “not like other girls” sort of person, so I’ve been avoiding doing that.
All in all, the above points are just a couple things I have been thinking about the last few days. A lot has happened over the last 7 years, good and bad. There’s a lot I would keep, and few things I would change - which I believe is important to reflect on, for reasons I stated in my opening.
PS: I’m sorry if a significant amount of this came off as first-world to some. Keep the salt to yourself though.