Ten Life Reflections from 2022

Friendsgiving charcuterie

Another year, another reflection piece!

This year on the surface was a challenging one for lots of new reasons, specifically with time constraints and juggling a lot of commitments with work, travel, and school. But first, some highlights:

• Celebrated weddings (had 12 friends get married in 2022!), bachelor parties, and many, many birthdays
• Lots of growth in my personal relationships and with my partner
• Continued writing, growing my newsletter to almost 3k subscribers, and getting my first opportunity to write for a bigger publication with Sprout Social
• Traveled a lot including sixteen different cities and two countries with two firsts — the first time in Vancouver and in Puerto Vallarta
• Finished 1.5 years in the Berkeley Haas PTA MBA Program, including some of my first upper-level electives and favorite classes
• One year at Grammarly with a lot of expanded scope

As I did in 2019, 2020, and 2021, I wanted to take some time to share some nuggets that stuck with me throughout the year.

• It’s nice to put a value on time. One of my biggest shifts in the previous year has come from unlocking time. Not necessarily doing less, but spending money to do more things of value. Inspired by a tweet around giving yourself an aspirational hourly rate, I thought about all the things that could take me hours/days, becoming much more flexible with outsourcing those in the process. There are a few things that I regularly put in this bucket: TSA pre-check, getting a Keurig to save time on coffee, outsourcing my move, and even getting more expensive flights with less layovers/rental cars to save money on Ubers. This year, one of my biggest investments was a car membership, mostly from tallying up the inconveniences and scheduling delays that came from taking a bus to Berkeley last Fall. Even Grammarly is something that I put in that bucket — being able to get rid of small commas and fractal errors while working on big picture writing has paid dividends every time.
• Disappoint others before you disappoint yourself. I’ve gone in and out of my people-pleasing tendencies through the years but this year was extremely challenging in terms of trade-offs. With lots of weddings, birthdays, bachelor parties, and miscellaneous events scattered throughout the year, almost every decision came at the expense of saying no or disappointing someone. I ran into this quote from Glennon Doyle that sat with me for a long time: “Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else.” While it didn’t necessarily stop the disappointment, it made me more conscious internally about choosing environments that I liked, understanding outcomes, and focusing less on the idea that disappointment was something particularly caustic, but more of a normal occurrence.
• Most of the pleasure in a dessert comes in the first three bites. Writer David Perell has a great piece on life advice from his birthday, but this is one of my favorite tips that I’ve almost used as a personal mantra. As someone who has been largely sugar-avoidant and eaten much less dessert in the last three years, I love this philosophy as a way to exercise both control and joy when eating. No regrets now when eating a good Tiramisu or Tres Leches.
• Authenticity is a struggle. I joined the millions of people who downloaded BeReal this year and one of the most consistently odd realizations I had was how many questions went through my head when trying to post. Despite the app being the antithesis of Instagram and Twitter, where non-curated content was welcome, my brain was still stuck in curation mode. Retaking selfies with bad angles of my face, redirecting the camera to better lighting, waiting for exciting experiences. I wrote about this phenomenon back in June, how the app has almost made us reconcile with how awkward we are at being normal.
• Going viral sucks. I went mega-viral for the first time (16MM impressions) on Twitter and it was awful. Impossible to use the app. So many random lanes of conversation to track. Random DMs from people trying to get my feedback on their opinion. Even after muting the tweet, the quote tweets continued for days. Nothing made me yearn for peace faster than going viral. My new existential quandary is pure confusion. Are all content creators secretly masochists?
• You can’t force yourself to read the Economist. As part of a business school class this year, we were required to submit current trends in economics before every class. I decided I was going to make a big life change and read the Economist every day, even after the class was over. It lasted about a week. Beyond the Economist, it was a nice lesson on setting goals that had no basis in enthusiasm, interest, or personal advancement. I desperately wanted to learn about the world and knew that it still was a goal — but I knew I had to learn more about how I consumed information better before deciding on a solution.
• Integration is better than atomization. I did an annual reflection earlier this morning and exercise came up as a constant thorn this year. I couldn’t stick to an exercise routine, was constantly changing gyms, and even completely forgot about a month of Classpass I had signed up for. The one bright light in my 2022 was picking up Pickleball and playing that on a somewhat regular basis. When I thought back to why I enjoyed Pickleball, I reflected on how I didn’t see it as “working out”. Optimizing a workout could have meant for time for socializing and seeing friends but I saw Pickleball as an efficient way to do both. Nat Eliason touched on this on his blog post about de-atomization being the key to happiness. Instead of atomizing fitness — making it a very, small specific task — integrating it into socializing made it much easier to find time for it.
• Shifting biases is like uninstalling scripts. I started working with a therapist this year who gave a very compelling analogy when it came to rethinking concepts around self-image and self-esteem. He basically offered that our perspectives are like operating systems, built by certain moments in our life. Our self-beliefs are programs that became installed because we ran into them so consistently. He asked me if what would happen if I ever uninstalled a script that contributed to a self-belief and decided to error it out. It was weird and wacky at the time but it made me reflect a lot on the idea that nothing needs to be permanent when it comes to the way we perceive ourselves. We’re one drag and drop away from the trash to installing a new script.
• It’s never too late. This was the theme for my health this year, as I dramatically brought new habits into my life that have changed things for the better. I got my first full-scale facial, invested a lot more in my daily dental care, brought an oil diffuser to help with stress, experimented with new types of melatonin, and started using daily vitamins for my health. I often cursed myself for being stupid enough to not do it for so many years. But ultimately, welcomed the possibility that the ripe young age of thirty is a fine time to make drastic life changes.
• Always take off on your birthday. My friend told me last year she never works on her birthday and it inspired me this year to do the same. I spent the day getting a massage, watching Argentina win their game, going shopping, and getting a nice dinner. It doesn’t seem too profound in retrospect but I can tell you that I have no idea what I did for most of the day during my birthday for the past three years. Not a bad philosophy :)

Whatever this year brings you in reflection, I hope it’s equally nourishing. Happy New Year and see you in 2023!