Jason R Brown

2021 Retrospective

01 Jan 2022

I’ve spent the last few days reflecting on the past year. A lot has changed in my life and almost all of it has been for the better. I made a list of either major achievements or positive life changes that I made this year and it turned out surprisingly long. While I was pondering these things, I read The Best Things And Stuff Of 2021 over at blog.fogus.me and felt inspired by the format. It made me want to do a dump of interesting things I read, and sum up some of the things that mattered to me this year. So without further ado, here is my personal recap of 2021.

Summary

Personal Growth

In October, we learned that my wife was pregnant. I’m indescribably happy about this news. I cannot remember the last time that I was so excited for something that I felt giddy, but I’ve felt that way for months now. Every time I think about having a child it brings a smile to my face. I have of course been doing a lot of thinking about how to raise a child to be happy, healthy, and productive and about what kind of father I want to be. Much of my reading lately has been on this subject as I try to get some of idea of what I’ve gotten myself into and how to prepare. I’m lucky that my wife has a strong background in child development to help me figure it out.

Developing Intentionality

Near the beginning of 2021, I wrote an optimistic blog post about the upcoming year. I wrote that I was beginning to experiment with reducing distractions in my life like anxiety inducing news feeds and trying to be more thoughtful about how I use my time. To a large degree, I think I’ve been quite successful. It can’t say I was able to maintain perfect consistency with my productivity systems, but I certainly got closer than any previous attempts. The important thing is that for perhaps the first time ever, I felt like I was on top of things and had a good handle on life. This is something that I want to continue to refine, in my personal, professional, and academic life.

Mental Health

Another thing that happened this year for the first time since my childhood is that I went an entire calendar year without slipping into deep depression. Despite all the craziness of the ongoing pandemic, the political turmoil, the major life changes that occurred, I’ve managed to keep my chin up and avoid the numb distant blah feeling that I’ve grown so accustomed to since I first experienced it as an 11 year old child. It’s weird to feel normal for so long. What made the difference? I stayed consistently medicated through the whole year which no doubt helped, but I’ve also been taking SSRI anti-depressants for almost a decade and a half and spent most of that time depressed. There are three things I think were key.

  1. Staying healthy
    • Maintaining a real sleep schedule has made a huge difference.
    • For at least the first 6 months of the year with my previous job, I stayed fairly active which also made some noticeable difference in my energy levels. This is one area I want to focus on this coming year.
  2. Deliberate use of my time
    • I’ve already written about how I resolved to spend my time less passively and try to make the most out of every day. No more days wasted of scrolling through Reddit or YouTube. This leads right into the third reason.
  3. Avoiding content recommendation algorithms
    • I’ve continued my pattern from the last few years of trying to escape addictive content recommendations. I’ve started using Wallabag and Tiny Tiny RSS this year to aggregate writing and content from people I find interesting or insightful and have a couple of RSS feeds in there that pull just enough random content from Hacker News and the like so that I still feel like I’m being exposed to to new and interesting things. My anxiety about the world has drastically decreased but I feel that I’m no less informed than I was before.

Reading!

I’ve managed to rediscover my love of reading! As a child I was a voracious reader. I began reading the Harry Potter series while in second grade and was consistently reading more challenging books that my peers. Around the time I got my iPod touch when I was in Junior High (I wasn’t allowed to have a smart phone) however, the volume of books I read dramatically declined. I continued reading novels through High School, discovering Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series and my love for Cold War fiction but reading only a few books a year. From the time I graduated and moved out to the beginning of 2021, I maybe read a total of five books. Once I realized that reading books had been replaced with the shallow, unfulfilling time spent endlessly scrolling I began yearning to go back to real reading. I made a halfhearted attempt at the end of 2019, and again in 2020. 2021 however turned out to be the year that I was able to reignite the fire and start reading again. I read a total of 37 books, including some rather hefty ones like the Iliad and the Odyssey, the entire Old Testament, and a number of Greek tragedies as I work my way through a Western Literature reading list.

Professional Changes

I started the year working a night shift was an armed mobile patrol security officer. While it was certainly an interesting job and I got a pile of great stories from it, It didn’t pay well and was never going to be a long term job for me. Some time around May, I read the book Tribe of Hackers: Red Team by Marcus Carey and noted a common theme from all the interviews in that book is that people got jobs and got into the security field through somebody they knew. Nearly every person interviewed recommended going to local meetups and meeting other people involved in the industry. I took this advice and joined the online community of a local Salt Lake City hacker space. They had a job board where people posted job openings and I saw one looking for an entry level IT tech. I messaged the person and we chatted about it and they asked me to send a resume and they’d pass it along to the hiring manager. I ended up getting the job and I’m convinced that the only reason I got it is because of that relationship, as insubstantial as it was, with a person on the team with an opening. I didn’t even know his real name and we’d never met or talked before he posted the opening but if that weak of a personal connection can make the difference in opening up a great opportunity then I can only imagine what a stronger relationship can open up. I’m now in a job that pays decently, is satisfying and fulfilling, and allows me to constantly learn and grow.

Academic Life

I started at Western Governors University in June this year. I’ve completed my first term doing mostly generals and finishing a total of 31 credits. I’m pretty proud of the pace I’m moving at but I doubt I’ll be able to keep it quite at that level as I get into more specialized and advanced classes.