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Was vaguely planning on doing a decade review blogpost - have a bunch of notes about it, but didn’t quite get around to consolidating it. Might still do it. But I have some time to kill right now at my grandma’s wake, so here’s a stream-of-consciousness decade review https://t.co/Y2SLEbu4Q1
Jan 2010 was the first time in ~15-16 years that I didn’t have to go to school. I had an unknown number of months of free time before I had to enlist in the military (found out in Feb that I was enlisting in April), and it felt like paradise. The most free phase of my life
I used to just hang out at the void deck with my friends. Our running joke was “what day is it?” “Idk mens, it’s just day!” - we didn’t know if it was a weekday or weekend. We played video games, read books, argued about philosophy... a precious, unscheduled, unstructured time https://t.co/dlbADL7o9X
In April 2010 I enlisted in the SAF. In a Singaporean context it’s not really a big deal, everyone does it. I was determined to make up for “wasted” time in school, so I read as many books as I could, and blogged a lot too, mostly about local news and politics. Played in a band https://t.co/N95kha3qYO
The most significant thing about 2010 for me was actually a Facebook group I created called \(n_n)/. Sort of an early instantiation of “Visa assembling a group of friendly nerds”. We had our own cult gesture and everything. 😂 learnt a lot about community management https://t.co/qprxOcmeR2
In 2011, I posted a bunch of t-shirt ideas on Facebook - mocked them up in MS Paint. People started asking if they could buy them. This grew into @jibabom, through which me and my partner Desmond have sold thousands of t-shirts and gotten all sorts of interesting opportunities https://t.co/uYlWTjUBgl
In 2012, my blog (and FB posts...?) started to get some local attention, and I was invited (along with several other local bloggers) to meet 🇸🇬’s Prime Minister. I was hoping to grill him with hard questions; turns out this guy is smart as hell and has answers to everything https://t.co/PyqUTMaVpw
Also in 2012, one of my customers (I used to hand-deliver t-shirts) asked me & my gf about our backstory, and suggested that we ought to get married. It seemed like a good idea... so we did 😂❤️ we were extremely broke 22yo’s, so we did it at a biker bar with a few friends https://t.co/I3at2ja8VW
Part of the reason we got married was to qualify for public housing - which meant I needed to get a job to pay bills. A founder of a local startup had read my blog, & I ended up working for him from 2013-2018. It was a period of intense personal growth for me First day of work: https://t.co/KTtTflvjPb
Btw that t-shirt I’m wearing? It’s from Quora! Was mostly optimising for a local audience when Quora helped me realize I could write for a global one. Also remembering that for my 21st birthday (2011), friends from \(n_n)/ bought me a Starbucks card to encourage my writing 😩❤️ https://t.co/tRfFmHVvID
While my wife & colleagues were great to me, my self-imposed pressure of trying to be a good husband & teammate + the psychological weight of my 30 year mortgage on my shoulders + drifting from old friends + long commutes... it all started to wear me down. I got utterly depressed https://t.co/oCrn1zEH4V
