Goodbye 2022, Hello 2023

2022 was a pretty good year. Starting out, it seemed to be as hopeless as the previous ones, but it got better. Somehow, I got a job and I travelled to a few places. As great as 2022 was, I wasn’t able to work toward my personal projects besides failing to remake my personal website over and over again.

Career and Financials

Late March 2022, I got my first full time job out of college five years ago. My mother went to a function hosted by a small co-operative bank and she talked to the CEO who was looking for an IT person. Initially I brushed it off like her previous attempts at hooking me up with a job but I thought about it and I realized that I might as well take it since:

1. Barely acceptable pay is much better than no pay and,
2. the longer I do nothing, the worse things get so I might as well start now.

There’s little programming, but it is something I’m qualified to do. It’s been 9 months now and it’s been a decent experience though it saps up so much time that I’m too lazy to work on other things. My main issues so far are that I’m not working as well as I could and that the money is tight.

Speaking of financial, I did try to build some good habits and it did work, but I sometimes impulsivley spend and life gets in the way. There was no point in 2022 where I didn’t have enough money to cover emergencies, but I was barely able to. Running a car is fucking expensive, but public transport here is shit so I might as well deal with it. Then again, a stitch in time saves nine so it’s better to fix problems while they’re small than to face a bigger problem later on.

I can’t complain too much since I was able to save money to travel and enjoy myself in the US, Qatar and South Africa however. Speaking of which.

Travel

After 3 years of not travelling due to not having a passport, COVID, laziness and COVID again, I got to travel again. Starting with Cape Town, I had a fun time exploring the Mother City¹ for a week, a place I hadn’t been to in 10 years ever since my brother died here. I then made an unscheduled stop in Johannesburg to meet my aunt and cousins I hadn’t seen in years.

Fast forward to August, we finally took our delayed trip to the United States to coincide with my sibling going to college. As they say “man plans, God laughs” meaning that things were more expensive than planned despite flexible booking policies. In the US we went to Miami, a Carribian cruise, Idaho and Orlando. We would have had more time as a family were it not for the college giving us the orientation schedule late.

In November, I decided to go to Qatar to see where my sister had spent the past 7 years working. Ideally I would have gone to the World Cup but I couldn’t afford the flight to Doha. Still, in those 3 days, I got to explore Qatar and catch up with my sister. As Beckham said, it’s a good place for a stop over and not much more.

In December, I went back to my aunt and cousins for the Christmas week. It was nice chilling with them but I wish I had more money to spend. Oh well…

I plan to write more in depth posts on these trips that I should have done months ago. Anyhow, onto the next thing.

Media

In 2022, I went through a lot of media and that’s not even all the media I wanted to go through. In fact, I doubt I’ll be able to go through all this media in this lifetime. Ideally I should have written about all of it, so I’ll try an do that over 2023.

Side Projects and All

I didn’t work on any side projects at all this year. As for writing, while I technically wrote more than I have before, I don’t want to count it because of the many times I remade my personal website.

I hope to stick with this website and improve it over time rather than destroying it over and over again and achiving nothing in the process.

Personal

While I’m okay being alone, it would be good to have friends and not be so isolated. I kind of did that at the end of last year, but I haven’t been the best at keeping up with it. I do cherish the time I spend with my family and I miss my little sibling who’s now trying to make it in college.

Health isn’t great given that I’m not only big but I’ve gotten lazier since I struggle to make time to work out and it didn’t help that my back would scream in pain when I tried. In hindsight, I don’t think it helps to respond to a painful back by not exersizing, but it took me $100 to learn that. Anyways…

Did I Meet Any of My 2022 Goals?

Probably not, but let’s go through them to rub it in:

• ❌Getting on my own two feet. This requires need lot more money (like 3–5x more than what I earn now). Can’t be too hard on my self since I was able to pay for a number of things on my own though I still can’t afford rent or my own food yet.
• ❌Building a nest egg. I tried and did suceed but as I said before “man plans, God laughs” so I had to use it to cover emergencies. Guess that’s the purpose, but I want to build wealth, not prevent losing it.
• ✔️Getting stuff. Should have been more specific here since I did indeed get stuff though I want more. Issue with getting stuff is that something bad can happen to it and I don’t have the money to replace it.
• Travel-wise:
  • ✔️Visiting Cape Town.
  • ✔️Visiting the United States.
  • ❌Visiting Turkey and Georgia. Not sure when I can visit them since that requires money that’s a bit tight.
• ❌Losing weight and gaining fitness. Doubt this will ever happen, but one can dream.
• ✔️Moving forward rather than languishing. Not as forward as I’d like, but I’ve actually made progress in 2022. Yay me🥳.
• ❌Content:
  • ❌Projects. Did jack shit on that front.
  • ❌Posts. I wrote posts al right, just not the ones I actually planned on writing.
  • ❌Podcast. Definitley not, lol.
  • ❌Take YouTube seriously. Nope.
  • ❌Figure out the newsletter.
• ✔️Contribute more to open source. Kind since I did 2 things:
  1. close an issue concerning a long running issue where Dart Sass in Hugo wasn’t generating source maps.
  2. Asking for more documentation around parsing XML in Hugo.
• ✔️Get a job. Suprisingly, I did but:
  • ❌It’s still in Zim and,
  • ❌it doesn’t involve programming or technical writing.

Did I learn the lesson of embracing experimentation and iteration? Not really, but I hope to next year.

Quote of The Year

Man plans, god laughs.

Self explainatory but this quasi-biblical² yiddish saying means “shit happens”. There are so many things I planned to do and life get’s in the way. Travel chaos here, burst tyres there—that’s life can you can only be so prepared. Still, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Is it worth making goals for 2023?

Probably not, but I’ll try to anyway.

• Look for a new job, preferrably outside Zimbabwe involving programming but it should pay me more money.
• Start building wealth. Sounds fancy but it just means that I should have money left over after covering my wants, needs and emergencies.
• Along with the previous point, get better with money. Sure I’ve never been in deep financial shit, but I haven’t felt prosperous from my spending either.
• Try making money outside my job. The only thing I know is contributing guest posts, but I’m open to other things as long as they don’t take a lot of time.
• Get back to creating and putting it out
  • for my blog,
  • for my side projects and,
  • contribute to online publications again.
• Get better at my current job and learn in general
• Travel. A basic goal which requires money I don’t have but I really wanna go places, specifically:
  • the United States,
  • South Africa,
  • Tanzania and
  • The Philippines

I doubt anyone reads my blog, but if you do thanks! I hope you have a great and properous 2023!