Log #10

Hello from a new day.

I realized that I have never actually explained why I made this blog. First of all, even though it is public, I am not writing any of this for you to read. Honestly, I would rather you did not read it at all. Let me put it this way: I can see all visitor activity in the website logs. Information such as IP address, location, visit duration, operating system, and browser is logged here just as it is on every other website. Even when you use one of those cool browsers like Brave or DuckDuckGo, (or a VPN) I can still see you, and since this website does not get many visitors, it is honestly not that difficult for me to correlate the limited information I have and work out which one of you has been stalking me. So please stop stalking me, because I am not keeping these logs for your benefit.

So what am I keeping them for, then? While I was doing my bachelor’s degree at Hacettepe, I took a numerical analysis course from the Physics Department. It was not normally part of our curriculum, but it was a subject I really wanted to learn, and I can comfortably say that it became the course I enjoyed most throughout my entire undergraduate education. More than the subject itself being extremely interesting, it was the fact that the lecturer had such an unusual personality. I suppose there is no harm in mentioning him by his full name here, since I am only going to say nice things about him anyway :) Emre S. Taşcı. I recently found out that he had moved to China, which made me very happy. He has a blog of his own, containing posts written almost twenty years ago. That was what affected me most. While randomly browsing through his older posts, I realized how many memories he had accumulated there and how carefully he had preserved them. That is exactly why I am writing this blog. He inspired me a great deal in that regard. Twenty years from now, I want to be able to look back and have direct access to the memories I collected. Our own ability to recall memories is limited, after all. I was either going to keep a diary or write everything in the form of a blog. I have made many attempts at keeping diaries in the past, but I either lost most of them or simply stopped writing. For some reason, the diaries I started with pen and paper were never sustainable. The ones I wrote on my computer never really established a place for themselves in my mind either, and eventually I forgot about them as well. In other words, it never became a habit. But for some reason, when I do it as a website, I associate it much more closely with myself. The thought that all these posts—or the website as a whole—could already be shared in the future also motivates me more. Otherwise, I would have had to compile everything I had written into a proper form later on. When it is a website, it is already compiled. Still, I feel like I should include more of the things I actually do in the blog. So far, I have mostly kept writing things that answer the questions “What am I thinking?” and “What am I feeling?” Hopefully, it will settle into its own shape over time.

Of course, as always, I am going through existential crises :) I would probably be a much, much happier person if I stopped questioning everything I encounter in life. But then there would be no ambition left either, and my goals would disappear. Being satisfied with what you have may bring happiness to some extent, but it also increases inertia. You remain where you are. You do not change, and you do not want to change anything. It creates a kind of resistance to change. It results in you making no effort to move from your current position to a higher one, because if you are already happy, you do not want to disturb it. The other version of this, however, means constantly harming yourself while making progress and living a depressive and unhappy life. You end up with a life that is exciting but full of suffering. At least, that is how it feels to me. Unless you were already born into prosperity, if you are dissatisfied with your current condition and you are an ambitious person, life is hardest for you—not for anyone else. Because in order to climb out of whatever social or economic shithole you happen to be in, it feels as though you are forced to harm yourself to some extent. You have to work harder than normal and behave with more anxiety and caution than the average person in certain areas. While trying to make progress, you feel that if even one of the short- or medium-term goals you have set fails to materialize, your long-term goals will be endangered, because there is nothing you can rely on or fall back on. In situations like these, despite every difficulty, despite everyone and everything, the one indispensable condition for genuinely being able to move forward is hope, and hope alone. If you do not believe that you will eventually receive something in return for what you are doing, you become increasingly indifferent towards life. Both positive and negative emotions begin to affect you less. Rather than being an emotional person, you start shifting towards being a merely sentimental one. Speaking only for myself, I can never motivate myself without setting absurdly ambitious goals. And without exception, these goals are always things that will rescue me from the situation or position I am currently in. Things that will physically carry me from one place to another. Thoughts such as: perhaps I will meet the right people there, or perhaps I will be more at peace there. I suppose it was partly as a result of motivations like these that I managed to get myself out of Turkey. I am sure they had some influence, even if they were not the sole reason. Anyway, I am only writing this as a note to myself: the easiest and most effective way for me to build discipline and motivate myself to complete certain tasks is to remain hopeful about the future.