睦月: On Restraint

I have signed up to do too many things in December, and am feeling overwhelmed. My goal in January is to survive.

On the title

Japanese culture likes to come up with fun name for things in life. Each month has a name that means something about that month. 睦月, for example, should mean something like "harmony" or "togetherness". This makes sense, given that winter tends to be the season where people are not farming and are enjoying time with family.

A desire to fill up my days to the brim

When I was at Canada/USA Mathcamp in 2015, I remember doing this as well. The classes at mathcamp have chili's associated with them, and the competitive part of me quickly signed up for many 3 and 4 chili classes. That made the experience of mathcamp miserable. The hard classes take a long time to learn and are not the best-taught classes among all the classes. It is hard for me to keep up with all the ideas being thrown onto the blackboard. Other people in the class are also struggling, but our teenage pride meant that we did not collaborate enough in those classes to try and still learn something.

Even after that experience, it is still tempting to load my days with difficult exercises and think that it will be a more optimal way for me to live my life. Sometimes I would see a sequence of scheduling that would work, like putting 5 destinations into 1 trip or stacking my schedules in the right way to have 6 hours of meetings. My mistake seems to be going from "I could do this efficient stacking" to "I need to do this". While the experience in 2015 was rough, this only got worse in college when I had the freedom to fill my schedule even more full.

During my sophomore year, I signed up to take 6 classes that are all quite difficult for me. The first semester had 3 "real" graduate level classes and 3 difficult undergraduate classes, which I got through by being particularly talented in theoretical STEM courses. Many of these classes are the best that Harvard had to offer, so I had a good time even though the experience was stressful in retrospect. I saw the days where I scootered from Northeast Lab to Allston with pride. There was a particularly bad day where it was snowing and my scooter broke down half way. I scraped my knees on the road and was hurting, but kept going to more classes. Yet, when I ended the semester, I looked back on that day with fondness thinking that I proved that I am capable.

Emboldened by my ability to preservere in that first semester, I loaded up my second semester with a similar schedule. That was the start of COVID semester, which made the experience different, but I hit my lowest point of college in the first 1.5 months of that semester. Instead of taking CS theory classes, I loaded my plate with a couple CS systems classes. My talent in CS systems design is simply much worse than my talent with CS theory. Two days before the homework deadline, I was hopelessly behind in Lamont Library trying to battle a bug that is causing my kernel to have a memory leak. Despite 3 hours of debugging statements and a couple hours of TA support on the previous day, the bug did not budge.

I called my parents, crying, saying that I need to drop something but also don't want to given that the courses are so hard. They were surprised why this was even a hard decision, and said that I should clearly drop the course with how miserable I seemed. Looking back, I was also surprised that I would stick with the class for so long. It seems like I am so fixated on a narrative where I am smart or valued only because I can carry a lot of work on my back and survive. However, I was the only person in the world who cared about enrolling in that class.

Why am I like this?

I don't know how much of this is genetic. My father also has a similar desire, where he will see free time on his schedule as another opportunity to park a side project or hobby into. Over time he collected a lot of hobbies from this experience, and became a more interesting person as a rseult. However, this also meant that I never saw him properly resting in his life. I don't remember him ever teaching me to be as driven as he is. Nevertheless, he is my role model when I am growing up, and I at least picked up part of this desire from him.

Being able to work through sickness, to presevere in hardship, is seen as a virtue at school. The teachers would praise students who are hardworking and reward them. We learned about the story of 雷锋, who spent all his time being selfless and helping people, and a story of someone studying late at night by using his neighbor's light. I cannot remember every story I heard as a kid, but they are all praising the virtue of preseverence and hard work. Looking back, at least some of these stories seemed ill (病态). They seem to relate the ability to presevere with the desire to seek out these terrible experiences. They never explain why the main character ended up in such a miserable situation, or sometimes the stupidity in their prioritization that led them to need this preseverence. While it is hard to have proof, this seems to be at least partly propaganda that aims to make people hardworking while placant (is this the right world? Something to mean sheeple).

Most of my classmates worked harder than I did. Their parents signed them up for extracurricular activities that filled every hour of their weekends, and micromanaged their homeworks. People would reach top level of piano early on, because their parents tell their kids how Lang Lang practices 8 hours a day and force them to practice for many hours as well. The stories of Hengshui high school, or any other Chinese education experience for that matter, all seem to be fit the same narrative.

Perhaps this is why my company has such trouble hiring from these Gaokao-adjacent countries. The fixation of hard work made people not realize that prioritization and reflections are more valuable than that.

Is it right to have such a packed schedule?

So many of my fondest memories came from periods where I had slack in my stack, so the answer has to be "no". I will share two short stories to illustrate this.

When I was interning as a freshman at a tech company, where the pace is slow and exercises easy, I also had lots of free time to think about what I should work on. I picked up hiking and started applying to many jobs. Quant trading internships opened early, so I focused on that and got the internship at the company I worked on. If my summer experience was more busy, I might have worked a lot harder while giving myself no time to reflect on life and pick up new skills. And, given that these new ventures led me to the job that I currently work at and love, it is far more rewarding than anything I could have done in that internship experience.

--

My last semester of college is a special time. There is little stress left from the academic experience, and people are relaxed. Despite my best efforts of stacking my schedule -- and I promise I tried -- it is near impossible for my schedule to become so full again.

For the first time since my summer internship, I had free time.

That was refreshing. I met up with friends I did not catch up with throughout college. I met new interesting people through dinners. People invited me to parties and late night conversations about life, and I made many friends through that experience. I also went on vacation trips with friends to many new countries, and had a lot of fun.

If I had the mental space to loosen my schedule a little in the first 2 years of college, I believe I would have had a similar experience. By taking 6 classes, I got a masters degree and was able to learn some interesting classes earlier. Yet, I gave up so much of my college experience to get that, and regret the friends that I could not keep in touch with because of my desire to do more.

My obligations for January

I was home with family in December, where I had lots of time to make plans and sign up for new projects at work. At the same time, I already have many big projects at work. Many of them are exciting on paper, and are exciting in practice, but it is impossible for me to try and do them all.

The main source of these obligations is work. During the last couple months of 2025, I was on a roll pushing new projects into production and introducing new ideas to our signal execution framework. Many of these work involved some pretty careful watching of our systems, which made them difficult to truly "finish". In addition to this, I am going on a work trip to Hong Kong later in the month. With multiple trips coming up and so many work obligations to pass off, I can see myself being on the edge of burnout.

I am experimenting with preemptive editing. Finding the projects that someone else can do, and generally under-promising how many things I would be able to deliver within the month. This feels strange, and I feel terrible for not getting to do every item I promised to do. I hope I will learn to sign up for fewer commitments in the future, so I don't have to go through this again.

In turn, I hope to have some new experiences in my life. I hope to find the time to explore New York and Hong Kong, and to organize events where I can invite my friends to. In a year's time, I want to remember what happened this year, and "working so much that I have no time for myself" does not lend itself well to this sort of experience.