The jury is out, I am not a well-balanced individual capable of functioning at a normal level in a modern society. The even worse news is that, with the advent of AI and announced singularity, there is quite likely not enough time for me to “Catch up” and mend my ways. To tell the truth, even these mediocre daily paragraphs devoid of research or any semblance of effort on my part are a waste of time, designed to help me tick a daily checkbox.

Let Go of the fodder

From a recent study on high-performing university students in China, the following results were seen:

The results indicated that mindfulness positively and significantly influence students’ SWB and academic performance. Furthermore, students’ subjective wellbeing partially mediates the relationship between mindfulness and academic performance.

This study strongly suggests to me that an effort emphacizing my meditative practice, alongside regular studying, would yield 2 or 3 folds the benefits of just rote memorization. When it comes to a test of endurance and performing under pressure that is the GMAT, no amount of classical training regime will land me a perfect score. It is only through complete mastery over stress, time-constraints and adaptive difficulty that I will be able to perform to my full potential, and make use of all the accumulated knowledge lodged in my brain.

Let Loose

So Losing My Mind might actually entail more than just craziness or frivolty. This is about letting go of the dictate of feelings and emotions, the grip thoughts have over your every waking moment. At the end, the world is in no worse shape than it was during your childhood, so do not make it even worse on yourself.. Look at objective metrics of your own progress, use others as inspiration and not as a source of Envy. The World is not necessarily out there to get you, and you will find that a majority of people will be there to lift you up, as long as you show a willingness to return the favor.

You are Not

As a 21st century monkey brought up on crooked values and swimming in technocratic black holes, you may think that your identity is this never ending robot-like emotion farm, where taking a breather feels quasi-impossible.

Waking up from a nightmare that is the societal norm is akin to a complete wipe of a system. You don’t get to keep drowning in brainrot while simultaneously come even close to rewire your overstimulated brain for good.

A Mantra for Life

The good news is, you are not alone. Masters have for millenia already figured out a great cookbook to guide us towards discovering our true self, with none of the voodoo woowoo BS hollywood snakeoilsmen try to peddle: No, this journey and practice rely solely on how much YOU want this to happen. A simple mantra can go a long way: You, the real you, are not your thoughts, nor are you your feelings. You may arguably not even exist as you’ve been illuding yourself for all these years. The guy you’ve been sharing a body with for 3 decades has not had a chance to exist, and take part in shaping his own existence, outside of external interference and biased data.

Feels like 82

Everyone from my generation wants to masquerade as a 90s kid. Its cool to be a part of that wave of teenagers that grew up with prime playstation 1 games, prime cartoons, prime pokemon generation, prime World of Warcraft revolution, and not to forget the plethora of music in multiple edgy genres at the time.. All of this to say that me being born mid 90s, had no access to any of that subculture until half way through the 2000s, mostly just catching up on Animes from the golden eras: many of which left their mark on me forever.

fabricated nostalgia

It shouldn’t be a thing to feel nostalgia for a period you have not experienced at all, but being a clueless child discovering these shows as though they were brand new played to my advantage. I am and forever will be a sucker for shows like Nicky Larson and Cobra.

A sense

As a young adult, I never thought to question why I was in a constant state of thinking, hopping from one anxiety and insecurity to the next. In hindsight its naturally very simple to blast my idiocy and ask better of myself. But in truth when your emotions overrun you there is no fighting back with a weak mind like mine. There is a foundational change in the hardware as well as the OS that are mandatory changes before you can even think about tackling deeply rooted insecurities and monkey-like reactions to environmental triggers.

Where to begin

At the base of it all, this overvalued sense of self needs a good nerf: you cannot continue living as though society revolves around your person. Of course, it goes without saying that one should not neglect their own place in society, however, dialing that egocentrism to a hundred and maintaining it is an exercise in exhaustion and lack of Zen; that sweet feeling of bliss, contentment and harmony with the world. This is not some voodoo BS, to be clear. Scientists around the world will echo these observations even on empirical cold data levels.

Let rest become Peace.

First App

Doing something for the first time is seldom easy. You have to grapple with anxiety, fear of messing up, confusion from a domain you are unfamiliar with blasting random facts in your face.. The list goes on. That is primarily why so many projects and initiatives tend to put a lot of effort on their “Getting Started” onboarding processes. And while this has made so many complex programming languages and libraries way more accessible to juniors and people of all skill levels, it has also sadly bastardized the process of deep learning for people with adult ADHD.

To explain this more sensibly, imagine if the only way you could ever learn a new 3D engine was to read through the well-documented codebase and trial-and-error your way through its many functionalities. That would indeed hamper your 0 to running application time, but on the flip side, any knowledge of the library you would have accumulated would have come from your own efforts and discovery, hence sticking with you longterm as part of your skillset. Contrast that with an overly handholdy Getting Started web page where you are expected to copy a bunch of lines, all the while absorbing the most surface-level, useless info dump about a trivial use-case.

Going Mobile

Over the past 2 decades, we’ve seen an ever-growing shift based on the convenience of smartphones, of people’s tech usage; from a nice desktop market to a mobile-first ecosystem that covers almost all software needs and applications. Unfortunately for me, I’ve only ever been a consumer in that market, failing to ever take the leap in developing my own small app and sharing that with the world. This is why I brought up the entire trivialized getting started debate in the first place: Yes, its cool to have a quick way into an unfamiliar domain, but I would also love to be shown the harsh truth and ungliness of a realworld app development project so that I can finally take a firm yes or no stance and proceed.

This short guide is going to take you through my brief journey learning the basics of creating a Flutter App that can read and write to/from a NFC Tag.

The Commencement

Flutter is a very popular cross-platform app development framework built by Google. From humble beginnings, it now boasts near-native capabilities and performance for its universal apps across virtually all mobile and web devices. Ever since 2018, I’ve had a fascination for that promising framework, but always found this or that excuse to stick to React and never bother learning a bit of Dart code to take my development skills to the next level. However, as with anything worth doing in Life, you need the right trigger, a purpose for your journey; and that is precisely why I’ve decided to try out Flutter for the very specific and limited purpose of NFC coding.

The Pitch

Imagine you woke up an hour later than planned to catch a plane. Panic settles in as you sprint through your morning routine, trying to make sure you have all your documents ready and packed. But then, the drawer incident happens: there is a drawer full of random gadgets and crucial documents all jumbled together, where you rummage through in the hopes of finding your passport. It takes you the better part of 10 minutes, with anxiety and frustration settling in, for you to FINALLY find it amidst the pile of garbage, and you barely manage to catch the last train to the airport before it was too late.

Well, what if we could do without these frustrations? What if you could simply bring up your phone to that drawer, and be shown a clear list inventorying the full indexed content of that drawer? That would be a pretty easy problem to solve using a cheap NFC Tag placed on each drawer! Simply bring your phone or smartwatch to it and voila! Instant access to the forgotten archives.

The Tech

Let’s talk briefly about my latest adult ADHD hyperfixation: NFC Tags. For a quick intro on what NFC is, check here, but as a quick primer, we’re talking about a simple technology that allows two NFC-compliant readers to send data to each other via a simple proximity “tap”. It is so convenient for things like phone/watch payments and small file transfers, but that’s not why I took interest in it today.

Organisational issues

As a freshly 30 male learning how to Adult, it won’t come as a surprise that my work/life/hobbies/whatever balance is very much out of whack: I have gadgets and everyday-use tools/items scattered in random places around a house I’m renting, to the point where I easily end up losing important documents or even my cards and passes just by virtue of the chaotic order I had setup in my brain and house was thrown the tiniest bit out by forgetting to replace said item in its exact old position.

The Random Chaotic Order works pretty well though, sadly..

In the adult world, this kind of approximated Order cannot fly. If I want to ever let another adult into my life, I have to get my life in order, figuratively but most importantly literally. There are a few cool systems out there for universal organization of items, physical or digital, and while I’m sure they do work for a lot of people, I am not “most people”. I’ve learned the hard way that unless chores are gamified and made into a convenient bite-sized meal, the only way I would ever put in extra effort would be because of an over-engineered gimmick.

Your brain on ADHD

Introducing: NFC Tags

This is where NFC Tags have a very appealing proposal in my view: through very basic scripting of smartphone tasks, you can place a bunch of small cheap pills in key locations of your house, which will each have their own script associated with recurring tasks in that specific location. For example, a Tag in the egg basket to start an egg boiling timer; or a tag under my work laptop that starts relaxing jazz music and mutes notifications. The possibilities are near-endless, and the whole thing is low-tech and simple enough to not introduce security risks IoT devices are most famous for.

Wut da Tag doin

Le Captaine Corsaire

I have to preface all of this by confessing that I am by no means a big sci-fi guy. I’ve forced myself throughout the years to watch the likes of Star Wars (original 2 trilogies), and the 2 recent Dune movies, but in general, the whole concept of life spanning multiple planets and solar systems does not appeal to me more than anything we already have in the real world. How about, before smoking more tax money on ships to nowhere, we figure out how to best take care and enjoy the many cultures and biomes we have on Earth, our only home? The fact that such a statement can be even remotely controversial is a joke, and a shame on our collective consciousness.

But I digress. As I grew up watching french television, the usual suspects in terms of cartoons and animes were on the menu day after day: your average fighting shounens, some nice romance animes aimed at boys, etc. The two notable exceptions were Cobra and Albator, which, in their own distinct ways, told a very gritty, adult sci-fi stories which broke a lot of the hollywood slop and formulaic movie.

A space odyssey

This show predates me by over a decade. First aired in 1978, it wasn’t until the mid 2000s that I got the chance to watch it on French TV. Back then, the intricacy of the plot and the whole concept of a doomed Earth spawning Space Pirates was all lost on me. All I could think about was the call to adventure, the general sense of anxiety accompanying this crew on their mission to nowhere.

The Crew

It would be an interesting journey of self-discovery to analyse how and why I used to appreciate seemingly adult and complex stories as a kid, seemingly from a very ignorant perspective as to the actual messaging behind the piece of art. Yet, that appreciation had something of the magical and whimsical within it, to the point where I yearn for an opportunity to dive back into that mindset, appreciating old and new media as an innocent child would.

The undesired State

As our society edges further and further into technocratic rule, and as the internet in its many forms slowly erodes our time spent in the physical world, what was once a major part of daily life, namely Boredom, takes a step back; becoming the demonised state of existence, the thing to avoid at all cost.

The many benefits of such a dramatic shift of the Human condition have been explored to death; I aim in this passage to give a concise observation of my own rapport with the tech world, and how it has shapen me into the man I am today.

Humble Beginnings

As a kid, and even as a young teenager, my parents were really strict about not giving me access to technologies, namely a PC, phone, or console, primarily as they themselves never developed interest in any of it. This has had a dual effect on my upbringing: on one end, I was a brainless underdeveloped child with no access to the infinitude of knowledge on the open web, while also breeding this unquenched hunger for the “things I missed” or was kept out of.

Brainrot Maxx

We are all gooners and step-brothers in brainrot maxxing

For the better part of my 20s, all I knew was a brain state of constant anxiety and mental activity. Now, early in my 30s, it has only gotten worse, to the point of physical deterioration, as well as dreading the day ahead with its unsurmountable checklist feel.

Living alone as a wageoid naturally bred me into a consumer of feel-good content, cheap empty content that can help my mind drift the pain of solitude and anxiety of the day away. I do that on the daily, mind you, without a proper plan in sight to mend this broken relationship with my inner self.

Walk through that door

There’s a way out, but I’m the only one who can push that door open. I’m on the verge of giving up on myself, even as I know I havent even scratched the surface of spirituality, a path to mend my ways.

Things do not have to be this way. An alternative, a middle ground is possible if only I could take the pain of catching myself as a fall into another thought loop, or engaging in pacifying time-hole activities.

Be One with the Self

Pushing 40

Its finally here, my thirties, and with them, a slew of health complications I could not have anticipated. For close to a decade, I had the priviledge of enjoying good health, fueled by my youth as well as religious fitness activity. I am sad to announce that those days are now gone; the back pain, the throat pain, and general weakness are all catching up to me now. No amount of minimum viable healthy eating habits and sleep will be the silver bullet to put me back on track. Its going to take a lot more careful consideration on my part. Starting with cleaner eating habits during my bulks, and making sure I maintain a clean environment that is habitable and breatheable, especially during winter season.

Stagnation

It does feel every time I get even a minor health setback that all my efforts at the gym can be undone in a matter of days. But that’s probably not the right way to look at things; after all, I’ve not seen a lot of progress when it comes to my physique over a period of several months at this point. Naturally, the period of weight cutting will be a much better visual indicator of gains and volume, and there is also the genetic factor of me storing all my fat in my face. This is reality, and I really just need to accept my limitations, embrace the few strength I’ve been gifted, and just straight up show up every single week consistently. At one point, good short practice on a schedule will yield some form of long term REAL results. In all aspects of life might I add.

And so just the same, I’ll be taking care of my health to the best of my ability, mimicking my approach to hobbies and daily activities in so many domains already.

Isn’t there some pokemon that can heal this thing?