Things that surprise(d) me

Certain things surprised me when I found them out for the first time.

• I used to enjoy being miserable. Only wanting to not be miserable was sufficient to start being happy.
• It takes effort to relax. By default we’re stressed both physically and mentally. (It takes awareness, to be precise. But for many, awareness requires effort.)
• Often, not yielding to peer pressure and following your instinct is the right thing to do. But it takes courage to follow your instincts especially your belief contradicts popular beliefs.
• Accepting misery is a path to joy.
• Even after so much change, I still haven’t accepted myself just as what I am.
• I have become, or I am doing, everything I used to hate in the past. Yet, it’s not all that bad.

From a Mike Robbins talk

I listened to a talk by Mike Robbins. Two points that I found interesting from the talk:

• One of the most selfish things you can do is to be miserable. You’ll make everyone who cares about you unhappy, just by being unhappy yourself.
• The answer is always a ‘No’ if you don’t ask.

JavaDoc for methods

If you find it hard to write JavaDoc for your method, it’s a sign that you should rethink what your method does. Most likely your method is doing way too many things and you should break it into multiple methods.

Life as a video game

Distance between “real life” and video games is shrinking. When I was a kid, my father worked 6 days a week, got a cash envelope every month which was later used to buy food and stuff for the family. You had to move physical things around to make things happen in the physical world.

Ever since I left college, I have never once gotten a cash envelope. When it’s pay day, a number on my internet banking site goes up... like getting a health pack in a video game. Every time I buy something, like being hit by monsters, that number goes down a bit. You often try to get things done with little loss to that number.

Most important goal of the game is to make sure that that number stays positive as you get things you want to get. And then there are all sorts of things you can do to artificially increase that number — for example you can get a loan which you’d pay back over years. There are also “danger zones” which suck your health points super rapidly (scams!) which you take great care to avoid.

It’s crazy how life changes right in front of our eyes and we barely notice it, if ever!

The US tax system and me

What is my “default” reaction when things don’t go the way I want them to? Anger. I get angry that things are messed up. This pretty much ruined my happiness in Hyderabad. I hated Hyderabad pretty much every day; I am not sure what good came of that hatred.

Now that I have just moved to California, I am angry again. Both in India and Australia, you don’t have to choose how much tax you want to pay. Your employer deducts the right amount of taxes from your salary and you get exactly what you should get. But in the US, I need to decide how many “deductions” I “claim”, how much extra tax I want to pay, etc. There is a long form to work out all these numbers.

Impatient and irritable, like my usual self, I don’t want to think about money. Even today, I haven’t learned about or made an informed choice on these numbers. I am not even sure if I am underpaying or overpaying my taxes. One thing I know for sure is that taxes are more taxing here than in any other country I have lived in.

Every once in a while, I hate this country for doing taxes differently, especially when I feel like I am paying way too much in taxes. Unlike in Hyderabad, however, here I am a bit more conscious of my hatred. Also, moving to California was a choice I made; not something imposed on me. Maybe I should relent and get familiar with this tax system. That would end this hatred for ever.