whydoitweet

The year is almost over, so I want to spend a bit of space reflecting on it. My post about 2019 last year only ended up with 4 upvotes, so I'll go for a shorter one this time :).

2020 in my life

No need to self-indulge this time around. We've had three lockdowns here, my wife Moqi got COVID-19 in spring, and broke her pinkie in that same period. Then in autumn I ruptured my Achilles tendon. Work-wise we both all got pretty much all our proposals rejected this year, and the crowdfunding project we set up didn't really take off either.

This was not a good year for us (or most others I presume), but there were upsides. At least all of us are now healthy again, the kids are doing pretty well, and I managed to have much more of a social life than in the last few years. Also, I hung out more with several online communities, including the one here at Coil of course :).

2020 in the world

Let's skip this one for this year. I'm sure you heard enough about the world in 2020 already! I'm very relieved that Biden got elected and that there are working COVID-19 vaccines though.

A few lessons I learnt in 2020

I definitely learnt a few big lessons this year! they make my 2019 lessons look rather silly to be honest. So here we go:

• At the start, I would track a lot of things around work, exercise and other things in a spreadsheet. But when I stopped doing that after ripping my tendon, I freed up a huge space in my mind! And I realized that less can be more when tracking my own life habits, because:
  • Tracking takes time and effort.
  • It also takes up mental space when I don't record things, because I think about all the trends I have in my tracked behaviors...
  • And the more things I track, the more ignorant I become of the things I do not (or cannot) track!
• The lockdowns taught me how much of the “pressure” I experience in life are actually due to self-imposed obligations! Stripping them felt like a huge relief...
• I'm getting older... The day before I was promoted to Senior Lecturer, I ripped my Achilles tendon in a seemingly random freak accident, where I just started a gentle jog. Clearly I have to be a bit more careful with putting strain on my own body.
• Small bad habits can have huge consequences. You see, the job obviously didn't cause my tendon to rip. I also did a proper warmup during that practice. But a few days earlier I did cycle around with a saddle that was too low, because I was too lazy to adjust it, and kept my foot at an awkward angle for 2 hours of cycling... The punishment was large.
• And lastly, a light one: Even though virtually nobody outside the US uses Coinbase, people still massively dump XRP when they do a partial delisting! (by the way, people shouldn't use Coinbase imho: Uphold and Binance are much better :)).

Wrap-up

I'll look forward to 2021 in a next post soon! :)

Credits

Header Image courtesy of marian anbu juwan from Pixabay.

Fast forward image courtesy of Wikipedia.