I’ve been sitting around all day, and not really interacting with many people because I moved out of the dormitory again and Typhoon Bavi has made going outside very unpleasant.

I am in Taichung, though, where we’re probably getting the least of it. I even went for a few hours of a walk earlier today to check if an electronics store was open because I wanted to buy the active cooler for my Pi 5 and I had seen that at this particular store before. But, the store was not open.

I’ve been thinking lately about how I’ve vented so much on my blog. I’ve kept using this blog as a therapist in the past, and I know that it hasn’t been all bad, but at a certain point I feel bad for subjecting all of my readers to my own life. I have a friend here who I’d lived with for about two weeks before I blew up at him for what, to me, sounded like constaint complaints about his own life without any intent to do anything about them. And while that was probably not my greatest moment, I have found that the best ways to manage life come from the inside, rather than just keeping the lid off all the time and letting it keep spilling over.

At the end of the day, 內耗 management is a core facet of adult life.

I feel like you know that, going into college straight out of high school, you know you’re supposed to grow up somehow via the experience, but everybody has a different interpretation of that. Really, this is the core part of the college experience and the experience of people in their early 20s all over the world, which is why it’s such a shame that my university continues to choose to increase tuition at double the rate of inflation every year while simultaneously continually growing the salary of the president, “his cabinet”, and one loyal tenured professor.

But that’s not super relevant to my conversation.

All throughout grade school, from day-care to your last year of high school, you make friends, form cliques, learn the basics of society in school, learn what your hobbies are and what your career interests might be. But I’d argue that the amount of safety that you’d generally be given through those stages (family, a home, time, things to do, and people looking out for you) don’t really give you an immersive enough experience for you to understand what life is going to be like once it begins.

Once people graduate high school, generally, some of those safety nets fall away and they have to get better at living life. You need to manage money, take care of yourself, make new friends, handle a much heavier workload, and get used to a new place. You need to form community for yourself. You need to actually build your own life, which is hard.

But even in college, you usually still have contact with your old friends, your family, you’re still perceived and treated like a child, met where you are instead of where you should be a little more often than is beneficial these days, and maybe you progress a little from your original understanding of life.

As in, if high school taught you that confidence, basic skills, and finding your people would make you successful, then college teaches you how difficult it is to build real confidence, how much time it takes to develop skills, and how few of your people there really are.

And, for the vast majority of my college experience until lately, I feel like that’s where I was. Just facing a reality check against an otherwise continuous, linear growth pattern up from the skills I gained when I was in high school and trying to find something to do with myself.

But linear trends don’t usually explain reality, and I think trying to go out and chart some kind of my own path like I did, somehow ending up in central Taiwan along the way, was just high-school style ambition that was inevitably going to lead me at high velocity into the wall of that reality we all live in.

When I came here last year, I landed and thought that three months would be more than enough for me to get used to things here. I thought three months would be more than enough time on the ground to improve the skills I wanted to improve, like my Mandarin language ability and that basic appreciation for the engineering process that they need to instill in all of us undergrads.

And I left feeling fulfilled early this past January. I thought that I had seen as much as I had wanted to see and that, if I returned, I’d know enough to be comfortable.

I was wrong.

I came back with two friends, hoping that my three months of experience last year would be enough to show them around and be useful to them. I was, for a few weeks. But they’re both good people and they picked up all the basic skills quickly and got to know everyone quickly. That’s cool.

And once I got settled back into everything, I realized that the same little annoyances and angers that I had been feeling last time were still around. Like, how I blamed my loneliness and unfulfilling social interactions in public on everyone around me, which, when you phrase it like that, make it sound like a more obviously incorrect conclusion.

I thought that people being kind to me, trying to be accommodating, trying to speak English even if it wasn’t that good, giving me little gifts when I didn’t have anything to give them in return, I thought those were all weird and annoying anachronisms that should be dealt with rather than just cultural differences.

But after these past two months of just thinking and meeting people and facing more of everyday life, it makes more sense that the thing that was annoying me wasn’t strangers trying to be nice, or strangers being annoying, or my friends not being quite the same as me. The missing thing was the actual community.

After a few months or so, you’ve lived in a city for long enough to internalize the streets, the weather, your surroundings, the landmarks, where good cafes and libraries are and the useful bus stops, but you don’t really have enough time to make real, long-term friends or ever form that sense of community. And that’s what separates a traveler from a local.

Which leaves me in a position of what is still mostly utter isolation here, a lack of knowledge of the people, the culture, and the times that is so strong it’s made any other kind of isolation I’ve ever experienced before feel imagined.

So, if the past few years have taught me how little confidence I really have, how much more time I need to put into learning the skills I want to have, and how few of the people in my life really are my core friends, than coming to a place like Taichung has taught me how important it is to value your friends, to use confidence as a tool for being nicer to yourself and to other people, and to let skills accumulate with patience as you live instead of letting life be secondary to your goals. Which sounds like a very philosophical realization, probably because it kind of is, and it’s probably along the lines of what a lot of philosophers have come down to in more academic terms and in more ancient languages.

When I write it out like this, talking about my top concern being personal skill growth and maximizing the value of my time really makes me sound like a strange self-improvement investment Gamestop stock guy who just realized that he, himself, has a value that can be exploited, which is really not how I want to be. Not that exploitative or that privileged, I mean.

Even if I’ve spent more than five months cumulatively in Taiwan by now, between last year and this one, and even if I’ve read a number of books and articles and listened to more than a few podcasts about it, I feel like I haven’t really been using the tools that it takes to live somewhere.

And granted, I haven’t really been using the tools here or anywhere. But I certainly have much more of a life back at home.

I know for a fact that the reason I’ve gotten so into urbanism over the past year or two is because of some kind of subconscious knowledge that this kind of idea is probably true, I mean, I want to get out more, see more people, get more exercise, make more friends, and have a nice third place.

Once you have that sense of community and belonging and those circles of friends at all levels, I feel like I know intuitively that that would be the thing that keeps your stress levels down and your sense of purpose up. I can start by being better to the friends that I already have and improve by being better to everyone else, too.

Maybe I’d be fulfilled to see the members of this little village up here in North District where my new apartment is get to know me in a positive way a little bit better over the coming five weeks or so. That would make me feel more fulfilled. There are certainly some great cafes in the area that I could choose to become a regular at.

Hopefully the rain is a little bit lighter tomorrow so I can go more places and get less wet.

Regardless, I do hope that I can bring this kind of mentality back home. And back again to Taichung someday. I do love this city.

That’s it for now with the magnum opus of my monologues, and I do hope to be back soon with fun and interesting projects to talk about. I’m currently getting the GameCube-shaped Raspberry Pi shell printed with SLA in the factory meant for product design students, and I’d love to be able to show that off playing Animal Crossing soon enough.

再說一聲，明天見！