Hey! So I'm James, I'm 24, and I've had this site for maybe a year and a half now? I was so excited about having a place to put my thoughts and to talk about my hobbies and ideas and interests that I became kind of overwhelmed by that fact and became too terrified of openly sharing those things where somebody can read them that I still haven't done anything on here apart from just the home page.
As well as that I have all of these ambitions that I just kind of cycle between because I haven't had the time and energy to do much outside of personal relationships and having a full time job. I desperately want to do so many things. I've always loved science and I have a physics degree that I graduated from 2 years ago now, and had always pictured myself making some grand discovery, but even though I managed a first class degree, I always had this huge amount of imposter syndrome in my last 2 years of my course, I was struggling really bad through a lot of it. I even feel like since then I've just straight up forgotten a lot of the stuff that I learnt, and sometimes struggle to reconcile the idea that I didn't get anything from it, educationally speaking. I know that I did, and I would never choose to not do that course at that University, I just wish I wasn't struggling like I was and managed to retain more, I just need to try refreshing on it all I suppose. Luckily because of covid all of my exams were remote and open book even in my final year. I still want to do science because I love it and I am so so so passionate about it, my 4th year project was on black holes and I found it super interesting but had personally found it very difficult to work with my supervisor - I never even looked at my results for that project cus I was too terrified of what his feedback was going to have been! But because of it I was put off from looking for PhDs which was my original plan upon leaving University. Maybe at some point I will look at them some more? Sadly scientific research on signficant topics isn't something you can just *do* at home.
Aside from academia, I really want some kind of creative career, I've been trying to on and off make Minecraft YouTube videos/streams for years but other things always end up being in the way. I also have this massive passion for video game design and I've got ideas and prototypes in the works but it's still just a massvie time and energy cost. On top of that I've been trying day trading and the stock market on and off for almost a year now because if you CAN get good at it, it's super lucrative and freeing, which would allow me to quite my job and spend time on the passions like content creation, game design and even reading more and expanding my current underrstanding of science. Unfortunately, the day trading is going oh so slow, because it is HARD and puttingeverything else to the side to focus on *trying* to make that work for me full time just isn't an option right now.
But yeah, for now, I've put day trading to the side (trying some swing trading in the background as that requires much less attention and also imposes much less stress and time consumption on me), and trying to stay focussed on growing a YouTube channel - and tackling game design for the idea I really have a lot of faith in, when the inspiration strikes! It would be lovely if I was able to quit my job and go all in on content creation for a couple of months (I still live at home anyway!) but that doesn't seem like a sensible option right now, so I won't be doing that sadly. I'm also just generally trying to eat better, get the nutrition that I need, and do the exercise that I need to do, to see the physical changes that I want.
If you've read all of this, thank you, it took a while but I've finally made a post, and just thought I'd put most of my current struggles here for you to read. I'm hoping that at least one of these things goes somewhere, and I'm going to try to share as much of what I'm doing and thinking about on here as I can. I'll do another post soon as an "about me" thing, that isn't quite as negative and me being unhappy with where I'm at right now. I am typically a pretty positive guy, I have my interests and hobbies, but life gets you down sometimes and I decided that I jsut needed to type these sort of things out here for, potentially, somebody to read. I'll catch you guys next time, thanks!
~James