April Progress Report
Welcome back to another edition of the progress report! This month's report will include some updates on old news and also showcase the new direction that my life will be taking.
One major topic from March was my lack of consistency when it came to coursework, especially in the wake of Spring break. April was a good turn around. I was able to claw back and finish the semester strong, studying for finals and performing well enough to earn all A's and B's. It's been a while since that's happened for me.
I ended up being quite reflective this month as my last couple of semesters are approaching. The college journey that I took wasn't the standard one but I'm not all too disappointed in myself in the end. I may have taken a couple of extra years to get through it all but at the same time I was able to focus on branching out and capturing a sweeping range of knowledge.
From the beginning of this semester I had planned on spending the time in between classes working on this site. I'm sure that you can see as well as I how erroneous my judgement was as we're four months into this journey and have barely moved. Instead, the majority of that time between classes was spent either napping or scrolling on the phone.
I have however one achievement which was my consistency with pulling myself over the bare minimum and publishing a singular progress report each month. While I still hope to ramp up my efforts, I am proud of myself for pulling myself just an inch closer to the goal.
To repeat some old news, I've done a great job keeping my desktop environment cleaner even while restoring my old library of programs. I've discovered new methods of organizing and compartmentalizing my work and setting myself up to work more efficiently. The main hurdle that has kept me down has been my lack of impetus to begin working. The few days this month that I managed to begin being productive, I was able to power through whole assignments at a time which felt amazing.
Going forward I am going to keep a better calendar system that will contain all of my goals. I'll be maintaining my minimum goals each month that I will be forced to keep up with but I will also implement additional reach goals that I can pair with rewards to really propel myself forward. Hopefully that'll lead to some extra posts being published this upcoming month. (I'm looking at you investment post...)
Unfortunately, while I have kept up with building the majority of my healthier habits, I've developed another strong routine... I've returned to playing one of my favorite childhood time sinks. Maplestory. And it's been a massive time sink this month. It all began as I was casually conversing with an old friend one day and some how the game came up which led to me listening to some old music. One thing led to another and here I am, spending a good chunk of my day grinding that old game once more.
The nostalgia is strong and keeps me motivated to play but I will force myself to scale back my game time because it's honestly gotten way out of hand. This has definitely been a setback when it comes to working on a new Svelte project. While I had a few ideas brewing throughout March, those ideas were thrown onto the back burner while Maplestory took the main stage.
Anyways I'm writing this in between bouts of grinding Maplestory if that tells you anything about my current mindset.
One big lesson this month came in the form of a YouTube video. A video that caught my eye regarding Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy. The quote from Kant goes: "So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means."
It's a pretty strong and hard hitting idea that I am trying to wrap my mind around. The end goal is to form my life around this central pillar and to build out the rest of my habits on this foundation. The proposition is quite simple. The moral way to live life is to treat all rational beings with respect, including and maybe especially yourself. It seems to be an often overlooked aspect of life, but we too deserve the respect of our own selves no matter the circumstances. Whilst we are only human and have to make mistakes, we are also capable of learning and improving ourselves based on those lessons.
With this in mind, the goal for May is simple. Learn to live a moral life and live life as a good person.