Pea Bee #2: We're here because we're here
Hi all, thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. This is only the second issue I am sending out. For this issue, I decided to do a brief disjointed recap of my last year. I thought if I’m going to be a bit self-indulgent, I suppose a personal newsletter is the place to do it.
After a lot of manual effort, I was able to declutter my email inbox last year. I unsubscribed to hundreds of promotional emails and blocked the ones that did not provide an unsubscribe link. I archived old emails, created folder filters for transaction receipt emails, and now, I only have a few dozen unread emails. At the risk of sounding like one of those inbox-zero wankers, I can say that opening my inbox now makes me happy.
In what was the penultimate year of my twenties, I learned how to wash my hands properly and I finally learned how to drive a car. Albeit an automatic one, but it was good to get over the fear. I had this unfounded hope that learning to drive will give my masculinity a boost - but the truth is, driving still fills me with a lot of stress.
This was a productive year for my hobby projects. I started the year with Scrolltrotter - a chrome extension to calculate the distance I’ve scrolled. It got featured on the front page of both Hacker News and Product Hunt.
I then created a Sadhguru + Ask The Sexpert twitter bot and made The Beatles sing Taher Shah’s Eye to Eye using OpenAI’s amazing tools. Even though only a few eyes saw them, I was satisfied with how both of them turned out.
When Scrolltrotter became a little popular, I thought this was the zenith that none of my future projects could surpass. Fast-forward four months, I made a modi-themed chrome Dino game at pmcares.fund. And I could not have imagined the way it would blow up. It was an unreal few weeks of my life that I will remember for a long time. I recently found out that someone added an entry of this game on the real PM Cares fund wikipedia page!
Liverpool won the Premier League. After 30 years! I wish it had happened in normal circumstances. But it was one of the highlights of the year for me - pure, pure joy to see them lift the elusive trophy!
Last year, I brought some order and sanity to my browser bookmarks, snippets of saved texts and links that I had hoarded over the past 10-12 years. It had become a mini ghost internet town of my own making. I let go of a lot of them and unfortunately, many of the links were dead anyway. But the ones that were alive, it was a sentimental trip to revisit them. They took me to many different old internet rabbit holes.
I observed a steady shift in the pattern of things I found worth bookmarking over the years. In a way, it was like watching myself grow as a person - reliving a decade spent on the internet. I saw my likes and dislikes change. From things, a young optimist in me had bookmarked to slowly seeing cynicism creeping in in some of the recent bookmarks. And all this to the backdrop of the ever-changing internet.
Adobe pulled the plug on Flash at the end of last year. It had to die but it makes me extremely sad to see the demise of Flash. When I was in school, I made many little and silly things on my pirated copy of Macromedia Flash 5. And shared them with friends on a CD-ROM (what a time!). It was my first experience of making something of my own. And I am sure it was for many. So many people built so many cool things on Flash just for catharsis and fun - and that is what made Flash so great. I’ve played some of the most interesting, weird, and beautiful games on Flash. It was such a great platform for self-expression. (Also RIP, Farmville)
At the end of the year 2019, I listened to an end-of-the-year episode from Anthropocene Reviewed. The host mentioned a song British soldiers used to sing during World War I. The lyrics of the song are just three words on repeat -
“We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we're here”
Here is a version of the song -
This is how he summarised the song - The lyrics sound like we’re stuck in some sort of a repetitive nihilistic hell with no exit. But it’s also a statement that we exist, that we are here, that a series of astonishing unlikelihoods has made us possible and here possible. We might never know why we are here, but we can still proclaim that we are here. Hope that it will get better, and more importantly, it will go on.
At the time, I wrote to a friend that the song was wise words of hope for 2020. In hindsight, I was terribly misguided about my optimism, but I think, this song is a very fitting summary of the last year for me. And like in the beginning of 2020 and in spite of everything that happened last year, these words remain words of hope for this year too.
If you’ve read this far, thank you, and wish you a happy new year. You can always reply to this email for any feedback or reach out to me on Twitter or Instagram.
you inspire me