My Next Quarter Century

The First 25 years of my life

I an content with the traje ctory of my life thus far. I stopped worrying about what my life ought to look like five years ago. I was a sophmore in college, and at the time dealing with some big issues in life. Stressing about what had to be done in the short term did not give way to good long term planning. So I put off ong term planning. I lived for the moment and the needs of the time. I was an adenosene junkie. I stressed myself out more and more and more trying to be something I was not. It took a mentor sitting me down for two hours and reorient me. He reoriented me

Here is what he said: (paraphrased)

Jackson why are you being stupid.

I'm being Stupid?

Yes, Jackson.

How am I being stupid?

You are doing the bare minimum to scrape by, you are not budgeting your time, you are procrastinating everything, you are leaving yourself no space for long term planning.

Well sure, I can see that. What can I do?

I have never been good at budgeting my time. I am incredibly efficient, but that efficiency comes only in the last moments approaching a deadline. The maxim about the leagth of time a project will take will fill the time allowed by the deadline, I think is true.

It was at this time that I first download linux. I, in an infinite spiral of trying to find "hacks" to improve my workflows to encourage work land in a weird place; luke smith's youtube page. I didn't jump all the way in to the arch, hyper minimal setup, but I did begin to expieriment with workflows, with marcos, and making my PC more of a Personal Computer.

Something borrowed

For my summer internship, I had to log my time in terms of hours. Because I was

This was also an oppurtunity to learn new tools to help me make sense of the litany of legislative documents I was tasked with viewing, with the emails I had to keep tabs on.

This co-insided with the release of ChatGPT. This early LLM was free to use, but It was a way for me to (even in its most rudimentary form) ask questiosn as I would to a person and at least get informed incorrect answer. This was perfect becasue it struct the balance of being a dumb guiding hand pointing my vaguely in the right direction, but couldn't be a crutch to do the brunt of the thinking for me. encouraging me all the while to

My next 25 years

I have learned that the enviroment you do work in helps tremendously. I have found that if every touchpoint is enjoyable, than the expirience of working will be sadisfying. In the weeks before my 25th birthday,