6 Months On, Where Have I Been?

Happy New Year!

After picking up some momentum last year in terms of writing, I stopped. I had started writing to add a more meaningful activity into my life. Like many of us, I had become quite  good at being perpetually entertained by anything other than my own creativity. This is something I became keenly aware of while working a summer internship at Abercrombie’s corporate office.

At Abercrombie, it looked like we had it made. We were overpaid rising college seniors who were given free housing in downtown Columbus, Ohio. The company (known for its discriminatory hiring policies) had seemingly only hired attractive, sociable people and encouraged our getting drunk together. As I write this, I realize this would have been a dream of mine at 17 or 18 years old. What would have been a dream, was a rather miserable experience for me.

I noticed that I neither gained nothing for myself nor added anything to the world while researching which men’s sweaters would sell better based on the latest fashion trends. Not only that, but the daily routine of commuting, working, commuting, lifting, cooking, cleaning, watching Breaking Bad, then sleeping seemed too little to ask of life. I had confirmed to myself then, that if I ended up in a situation where I was working too much-especially in something that I did not enjoy-then I would end up desperate for meaning without the time or energy to do something about it.

This experience was in stark contrast to the grand experience that studying abroad in Edinburgh for the 5 months prior had been. I had felt nearly constantly engaged with the present moment, with the friendships I was building, and with the history that I was surrounded by. It felt to me that this was the type of experience that I should want to be engaged with for as much of my life as possible.

My study abroad experience ended and 3 days later my internship at Abercrombie started (I tried to get out of the first week or two of a 10-week long internship in order to travel around Europe some more but was quickly put in my place). The drastic transition from the idyllic world of an exchange semester to this job that could have turned into a career was one of the most formative experiences of my life. After returning to university to finish my senior year, I refused to talk to any recruiters for jobs as I knew that I did not know what I wanted to do and would too easily get pulled into a “Golden Handcuffs” situation making powerpoints and getting paid nearly 6 figures at age twenty-two.

If you know me personally, you’ll know that I have taught high school math in Bolivia and Morocco. You may also know that I currently tutor high school and college math while living in Buenos Aires. I am thankful that I have found a way to do something that I love which has allowed me to see some amazing parts of the world. However, I am not proud that, with the success of my tutoring business taking off in the latter part of 2023, I have gotten lazy with my “numb time” (free time situated within the cracks of our scheduled lives).

I felt as though I needed this time to “unwind” as work picked up, I attended regular spanish classes, and I trained for a marathon. So the breaks I had, I mismanaged with some good reason. Once the marathon was over, I had more free time and let it be filled with Facebook, Reddit, and game after game of online chess. I was overdoing this and being a worse boyfriend to Luciana as I became somewhat arrogant about my modest success as a remote math tutor. Then, I just felt stuck in the loop of being entertained. I felt I had nothing to share nor could take the time to complete any ideas.

A few days ago, I got an infection and decided that, while sick, I would download Instagram again after a year and a half of being away from it. I had 20 some unread messages that I knocked out in a couple of minutes and I looked up some friends that I had seen much of in awhile, but, after that, I mostly just saw advertisements or “suggestions for you.” The experience of not looking at Instagram for a long time meant that you had a very long feed of pictures posted by people that you follow in reverse chronological order. Like looking at the stack of Christmas cards that my mom organizes each year, I was looking forward to a similar sort of virtual experience. To my dismay, it seemed that the app that had intended to be used to share photos with your friends had been bastardized into hyper-personalized ads, posts, and “reels.”

Somehow this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I reminded myself that my frustration with current major social media platforms propelled me to start this Substack page. And although it is a lot more work than uploading a story to Instagram, I know that I would prefer to read something similar coming from any one of you reading this. I know I will feel a lot more satisfied when I publish this than a story that gets a lot of likes on Instagram. After sharing this to a “close friends” list on Instagram, I will delete the app again. I’ll still have numb time and I probably won’t always fill it very well, but, at least, I can make it harder for myself to use it in the easiest ways possible.