I’m 22 today. Happy one year closer to death1 for me! I’m already a fifth of the way through my 20s, that’s wild to even think about.
I’ve wanted to start doing a retrospective (retro) on life each year, almost like a New Year’s post, but on my birthday. Kinda cliche, but it’s gonna be less “New Year’s Resolution” and more personal reflection.
My 21st year of life has somehow been both uneventful and eventful at the same time. Let’s look back on what’s been going on thus far.
Deconversion
This one’s probably the most important event to me, personally.
I formally renounced Christianity from my life on July 7, 2025, when I left my church. I had already been atheist for at least a year up to that point, but remained in the church out of fear that I would lose my job, since it was based on building a faith-based platform for connection. I didn’t agree with the objectives while I worked there, but I silently participated and just kept my mouth shut, so I could continue paying for school; it just became unbearable after a while.
Interestingly enough, almost no one has contacted me from there since then sans a few friends that I had already told the news to. It’s almost irritating (but also a little liberating) to realize that no one really cared, since it means I can cleanly put that era in the past. But it also means I was used; I volunteered almost every single week, you would think someone would notice. But nah. That was the irritating part; being a simple asset to them, and not a human2 worth talking to outside of “serving”.
Sometimes I really do think about the times that I used to play drums with people that I loved talking to, and all the things that I believed. It only gets more nostalgic every time I drive by the place, since I haven’t really done many drum gigs since then. But more on that later.
You can read my deconversion post about it if you’d like to know about why I renounced my faith.
Burnout/Job Hell
I went through two large periods of burnout last year. It wasn’t fun at all; I’m sure most people that have gone through burnout, if not all, would agree with me here. My first one was right around this time last year from April-May 2024 at the end of my Spring 2024 semester, and I had another one that lasted much longer from November 2024-February 2025.
Burnout is hellish, especially when they last for extended periods of time like mine. I didn’t feel like getting out of bed, like eating, like doing anything at all, even though I knew I needed to. Tickets and fulfilling work tasks? Down the drain. Projects for school? Down the drain as well! Especially when ADHD paralysis hits, and you’re just sitting in bed, feeling like you’re enslaved by the grips of YouTube and Reddit and Hacker News on your phone, and you want to throw your phone across the room to stop. It’s genuinely claustrophobic at times, and it feels like nothing can help but escapism through various means3.
It doesn’t really help that I ended up basically quitting my church-based startup job at the beginning of August 2024. It was not working out financially anyway, and the faith issues I mentioned earlier only made it inevitable4. After that, I went through an unemployment stint until November 2024, and briefly worked at another startup until I lost my job yet again in January 2025. I have not been able to find a job since then (as of the time of this writing) because the job market is that hellish. Crazy, right? I like to think I’m a pretty competent person, but not being able to hold jobs because of burnout gives me massive bouts of impostor syndrome, and some days I feel like genuinely committing suicide because of it. But I digress; good times will come some day, right?
New Projects, New Friends
Not all has been bad, though.
I’ve made a ton of new friends, mostly at San Francisco State University (SFSU) through various classes and at their Computer Science Lab. While I was funemployed5, I managed to carry an entire semester’s worth of people on my back, running an underground tutoring service for an operating systems principles course that I was also taking at the same time in Fall 2025. I made almost $1,000 too! By far one of the best classes I’ve taken in a university setting, thanks to a great professor. I also started really talking to people working on various projects like a game engine from scratch, among other cool things. And I’m building a car right now with some of them for my embedded Linux class! Exciting stuff. And I’m not afraid of working on large projects that seem out of my pay grade anymore, especially after watching this great low-level source dive YouTube series, so that’s a plus.
I’ve been doing open source contributions as well. I’ve continued to work on my
NixOS CLI, and am almost done with
a full rewrite of it from Zig to Go that I’ve been doing solely while riding
BART to/from university,
so I’m not done yet. But I will be soon! I’ve also slowly been increasing my
contributions to various Nix ecosystems such as nixpkgs and home-manager. My
goal is to become a committer to these places in the future, and I would also
like to participate in Summer of Nix
this year, if possible.
Basically, all I’ve been doing is just improving the open source world, and honing my own skills while I’m at it! It’s really enlightening, and I hope that others can read from it.
Graduation
I’m a month out from graduating with a bachelors in computer science from SFSU. It’s surreal; I don’t plan on pursuing a master’s so this is gonna be my last month in school. While I’ve been working at various startups my entire time throughout college, I can’t imagine not going to school anymore.
Like, where the hell am I gonna make new friends? I sure as hell can’t do it from my computer, I tried making friends online during COVID and it didn’t fucking work at all.
What’s gonna happen to my old friends that I’ve been making? I don’t want to lose them because we’re not in the same place anymore.
Will I have time to start making a life for myself? Because hell if I want to move out, have you seen the fucking rent elsewhere? The Bay Area is a goddamn expensive place to live in, and I’m still looking for work! I’ll stay with my parents, thank you very much.
I plan on flying to India for a time, to see my family there. My grandparents and cousins are all over there, and I’ve never been able to see them for more than a month at a time. I’d like to change that. But what comes after that?
There’s a ton of questions I’m gonna have to answer, and rather soon. Because I definitely can’t deal with two more years of school, that’s for sure. But I’ll be sad when it happens.
What’s Next?
Well first off, I want a job, as I mentioned prior. It sucks being funemployed. Here’s my master resume, in case you’re reading this and you’re hiring. Plus, I would need money for all the things I’m about to mention next.
I mentioned earlier that I don’t play drums as much. That’s true, unfortunately. So it seems, that:
I’ve lost the plot.
I wanted to play drums for a living, but now I’m just stuck trying to make a career in tech. This sucks, and it genuinely makes me wonder what I’m doing it all for in the first place if I’m not gonna practice the one thing I’ve enjoyed my entire life.
It all went wrong when I left the church. I had already not been practicing, but that was because I was in a death spiral of using my church gigs as practice time, since I ended up playing so-called “contemporary Christian music” that I fucking LOATHED6. When I left the church, my practice came to a screeching halt.
I plan on doing better in this regard. Even though I’m busy now, I will have to force the time back in. It won’t be fun at first. I’ll be throwing my sticks at the wall, wondering why I don’t have the same speed, the same skill. But it’ll all be worth it in the end, I hope. Let’s see in next year’s retro if this is the case.
On a different note, one of the newest aspirations I’ve had recently is because of the 2024 US elections. I no longer want to stand back and see it all burn down while not lifting a finger to stop it. I’ll either see this through, or die trying.
I want to get into politics.
I don’t know how, or where I can get started, but I will, eventually. As much as I hate electoral politics, I see no other options for my political ideas to start reaching a wider mainstream. And the populace is hungry for fresh ideas, because the LORD knows that we have not had any in centuries, it feels like.
There’s a lot more I can say about this, and I’ll probably write a post about it too. But I’ll leave at that for now. The TL;DR: I have dreams, and I want to ensure that I can fulfill them reliably. Seeing how fucked the current state of politics in the US is, I fear that this may not be possible unless I do something about it. This requires candor. Revolutionary thought, even. Let’s go where no one has dared gone before. Think new thoughts that no one has ever thought. It’s all possible, we just need the time to see it through.
Here’s to a new year, and new aspirations.
Footnotes
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I do this as a joke with my friends when I say happy birthday to them. Or “happy one year closer to the apocalypse!” A way to kill the mood, sure, but at least it’s different and turns some heads, right? ↩
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Like “Human Resources” at a company. It seems uncanny to me that people would even refer to other humans as “resources”, but that’s precisely what it felt like at the church. I don’t think anyone likes being “used”, but a lot of religious people definitely are being used in a sense; that included me at the time. ↩
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Oftentimes, I would smoke weed or have a little drink before working on things for an extended period of time. It would help me to not overthink or have anxiety about things, but I recognize it’s an extremely bad habit. I’m remaining sober and off drugs for the time being, so I am not addicted or anything. I just want to re-evaluate their place in my life after a break. ↩
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Turns out that the company that I was working for previously has rebooted into some other faith tech thing called Seedling. Well, even though I can probably go back, I am not interested in this sort of thing in the least, and I have no desire to work on things I don’t agree with. Prayer is placebo, as far as I’m concerned. ↩
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Yes, I call it funemployed instead of unemployed. I get to work on myself, and I also get to make things! Gotta make the most of having no obligations to some capitalist scum, right? ↩
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Yeah, I hate playing this style of music. It’s so generic, South Park even made an episode about it. On the other hand, Loathe is an amazing band, listen to I Let It In And It Took Everything and be enlightened. ↩