What 2020 Taught Us About Ourselves
Tags: Life, Self-awareness, Self, Self Improvement, Life Lessons

What 2020 Taught Us About Ourselves

The year made us appreciate things we once hated.

Photo by Charl Folscher on Unsplash

This morning I went to YouTube’s recommended section, originally planning to watch the latest late night show episodes and get my update on what you guys across the big pond are doing to your country.

Instead I ended up watching a soccer goal compilation, which has to be the first time in my life that I did that. I never liked soccer, whenever our news casters went on to talk about sports I switched off the TV.

In the same ways I learned to like the simple pleasure of comfortable pants, not quite to the point where I would wear them in public but I do wear them while working from home most days.

I learned to enjoy meeting and talking to people after two decades of doing whatever I possibly could to prevent human interactions.

And while that is just me I believe that we can all agree on seeing our priorities, beliefs, work and pastimes shift in all kind of weird, unexpected ways this year.

So what then, does that teach us about ourselves?

Priorities do shift.

This makes me afraid, it may mean that I end up one of those guys with a house, a family and too-big-a-car that is financed where I can barely keep up with the montly payments.

I can only hope that I will be able to maintain my disgruntled loner state who likes work more than living and fills every waking hour with productivity of some sort, that is certainly the easier life to live.

We need some form of continuity in our lives.

If I look back at my own life I have usually made larger changes while retaining continuities and routines in other areas — even if I ended up changing those soon after sometimes.

So maybe I would move places, but stay in contact with people of the old worlds, then once we inevitably grew apart I had my new world offering me continuity.

2020 has tossed a lot of those around, shuffled the cards and the dices fell in weird, unrelated ways sometimes. I think that a lot of us have suffered from this uncertainty on a larger scale more than the uncertainty in our personal lives. Unemployment security used to safeguard us all from going hungry, but I think this year was the first when many started wondering how long the state would be still in a state (hah) to cover those social securities.

Staying adaptable may just be the most powerful skill we can hone.

Anyone remember the gay, jewish ex-nazi who realized one day that he should probably reevaluate his beliefs? If a guy so deep into any one rabbit hole can recover and readjust then so can we, right?

My life in retrospect has been a long string of swift and drastic lifestyle changes and I’m incredibly glad for that. I lived in eight different cities, towns and villages now, worked a farm job, did construction work, assembled e-cigarettes in a warehouse — and then somehow ended up in a hectic programming job that got so bad now towards the end that I’m delivering pizza to clear my head.

So I guess I have the advantage of change being my routine, this time next year I might be at a completely different place living a completely different life. Who knows, who cares.

We can live well on much less than we do right now.

I am nowhere near rich, but I’m entering that frightening stage in life where I begin to have actual savings, haven’t needed to touch my emergency fund in months and money comes in slightly faster than I can reasonably spend it.

But there was also a time when I lived on the 650€ a month that we were paid as apprentices (obviously with help of my mom but still) and somewhere in between those two I was working hard at substandard wage and lived a life worth living regardless.

I have good memories of those days, I even own a now-dysfunctional pilot watch that I bought from a rare, unexpected year-end-bonus and treasured ever since. I should probably have it repaired, but it was cheap enough to make the repair more expensive than buying a completely new one so I’m on the fence with that.

The point here is that I live more on less than other people spend to live miserable lives.

Happiness is not in things or people but rather in the moment.

I live a weird fringe life where I all-but-know that the life I’m currently living is due for a change in little time — that includes people I like, people I dislike, the things I own and the plans and dreams I have at any given moment.

Right now what I enjoy most is the weirdly stressful, weirdly relaxing way I meet with a friend who is a nurse working at odd hours, varying shifts and only a week’s advance knowledge of when and where we might be able to meet. The other night she needed moss for Christmas crafts so we met in the darkness of the early morning hours to hike around a lake and hunt for patches of moss to the shine of our flashlights — as you usually do.

That was fun by the sheer weirdness of the idea, even before adding the interesting conversations that arise from living two vastly different lifestyles.

I treasure those moments, much like the nights I spent working late into the nights constructing event locations, the hours on the farm cutting firewood, riding a tractor for hours across the interstate after a one-minute crash course (that’s the gas pedal, that’s the brake, if you think you need turn signals those are there) — they are insignificant on the greater scale but I still enjoy thinking back to them.

Having too much time to think can’t be good in the long run.

This year has seen me change my ways in more than just one regard, the main one being that I started to live, think, read and write again after what feels like five years of absence from life.