A bit of “me” time

I will start a series called “Updates” (look how creative I am with naming!) to share out of topic articles, mostly about my own personal life!

The decision stems from my decision to ditch out addictive social media sites out of my life. I have been an instagram user for quite some time, but lately it started occupying a great amount of time of my life, which made me start worrying and led to overall reduced productivity. That aside, the overall platform use caused unreasonable stress & anxiety on me, ranging from fear of missing out to just feeling desperate out of no reason in particular. I wrote down my thoughts on the matter to a paper alongside with pros/cons to identify the overall effect the platform is causing on me. I concluded the overall damage to my mental health, and exposure to unnecessary content alongside with the time I wasted there alone are enough reasons to pull the plug out.

However, I still need a medium to share from my life, music I play, stuff I accomplish or fail at, my travel log and more. While I am overall on the line with “well, nobody cares anyway” mentality, I still like sharing them out.

Going forward I have decided to use this blog as a new medium to share a bit more personal updates (using this blog series). And on top of that I am planning to start recording videos for YouTube, starting with videos of me playing classical pieces on piano and maybe if I get confident enough I may do some vlogs? Probably not, but I am hopeful! I will try to record one during my London visit which I am planning to do on Q3 2024, no promises though since I really have some issues to tackle in terms of self-confidence and social anxiety.

With the time I got from ditching social media, I decided to start playing some games. I managed to finish “Rise of the Tomb Raider”, “Kena - Bridge of Spirits”, and recently started playing “Sekiro - Shadows Die Twice”.

I am not usually into hardcore gaming, therefore I expected to get bored out of “Sekiro” very quickly since the souls-like genre is known to not even offer a difficulty setting, let alone offering a forgiving gaming. However, the katana fight is very enjoyable. I didn’t bothered much when I spend 45 minutes trying to cut my way through enemies only to get killed in a few seconds of fight and respawned at where I started. I felt sorry, but I also didn’t felt bad since I managed to gather some resources on my previous run that I can use to upgrade my gear to get a better chance on my next run. From what I read from the Steam Community, the game supposed to teach me being patient and moving slowly & smoothly.

Education

I dropped out of university in 2019, roughly 20 days after starting my studies there. At the time I have been working on Fonibo, trying to launch a product. With additional stress from studies, some financial stress, on top of entrepreneurial responsibilities led to a decision that I made out of blue when I got mad on a bus due to a completely unnecessary reason on my way to university. I decided to stop attending to classes and eventually decided to withdraw completely. Of course my family were not welcoming with my decision, so I kept this as a secret for a long time. I don’t remember the exact details but long story short, I thought university was a waste of time and decided to dropout.

Moving to now, I now have plans to start university to get my Bachelors of Science degree. This time however, I have different plans. This is not a declaration of my past mistakes, I don’t think it was a mistake to start with since that decision led to many great improvements in my life. And the studies at the particular university wouldn’t have helped me anyways, since seems like in 4 years, my ex-classmates seem to learned about Operating Systems from scratch on each year, and still on Master’s Degree they are starting from scratch once more. While I learned about CPU architectures, transistor level CPU design and writing OS kernels by myself.

That said my plan is to study abroad, hopefully in a better university where I can learn more or get to know interesting people there. While studying abroad isn’t supposed to magically improve education quality, the education in Azerbaijan I would say is worse than average, so even getting an average education would be an upgrade!

Right now I have applied to 4 universities in Eastern Europe (because my credentials were not sufficient to apply to Western universities) and waiting for their decisions.

If I manage to secure a place, I will start my studies around September 2024, will have to move to another country and adapt to their culture. Seems like a fun challenge to spend some time with!

I am slightly worried about managing my time between work and studies; but I don’t really have much to do beforehand other than letting my employer know and they seem to be supportive with my decision.

Overall this year is a mix of boring and exciting updates from my life. I also started seeing a therapist this year, to help me navigate with my insecurity issues, but mostly just to experience & get an external feedback. Which was helpful to understand certain aspects and understand myself better. I may write an in-depth post about this subject later on, however for now I don’t have anything else left to write.

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading (: