I’ve been active on Threads for 2 years now. On Threads, people love to give their takes. I do too. That’s how you get followers and engagements.

What usually happens on Threads is that someone posts their takes, usually like a rule of thumb on how to make good decisions on something (dating, money, friendship, politics). People will give likes if they agree, but most likely will comment when they disagree. Interesting—albeit controversial—takes can get viral so fast.

I’m an ordinary human being who gets dopamine from likes and engagements, but I’m also trying to be a responsible, decent human being. This means when I post my takes, some kinds of rule of thumb, I’m trying to add nuances when it’s necessary. I feel like I’m responsible if people end up considering it as universal truth, and apply these rules of thumbs to their life, which may have completely different contexts from my life.

Some people may argue that a person sharing idea is not fully responsible for their ideas. The audiences are also responsible for discernment: filtering and choosing (memilah dan memilih) what kind of takes or rules of thumb are applicable to their lives. This is true. At the same time, I think we should be responsible for what’s within our control. There were time when I could not sleep, thinking about some irresponsible takes I posted that could have used more nuances.

—

Consider this overrated dating rule of thumb: men must pay on the first date. This kind of conversation pops up almost every week on Threads, and it’s super tiring. I keep clicking “Not Interested” every time similar threads show up on my timeline, but it’s almost impossible to avoid. Sometimes when I’m bored I chime in as well (that’s probably why my algo can’t save me from my own impulsivity).

It’s a simple rule of thumb that will guarantee engagements. It’s a nice rule for women to protect themselves from men who probably lack the means for a serious relationship. It’s a filter for gentlemen (if your idea of a gentleman is gentleman in the traditional, provider sense).

But, also, it’s not universally applicable.

What about a date between two broke college students? What about low-stakes hangouts between friends testing the waters for chemistry before calling it a date? What about dates with men who simply are not aware of traditional dating etiquette? What if these men actually want to respect a woman’s independence when she offers to split the bills?

There are so many possibilities. The rule of thumb does hold some truths to it. But what if someone’s posting that take is responsible for keeping someone away from their supposed soulmate?

—

We make, and believe in, rules of thumb because it’s easy. We want our life to be governed by some certain rules. That would make both discernment and decision-making simpler.

We probably make rules of thumb because we have been hurt in the past. An ex who didn’t pay for the first date may turn out to be a jerk. So, to protect ourselves from future hurt, we develop these rules of thumb in the hope that we see things more clearly, and make wiser decisions.

But rules of thumb also makes us lazy. Sometimes it even makes us gaslight our own intuitions. For example, the rule of thumb for resigning from your job is “do not resign until you have another job lined up”. But my intuition said I need to resign immediately to free up time and mental space to figure out what I wanted to do (I discussed it in my other article).

It’s also funny to read some of these rules of thumb and realizing you’re the person these rules talk about. For example:

• “If you see someone who talks trash about all their exes, run.”

• "If someone opens up about their deepest trauma on the first date, run.”

I have done these both and thank God my husband never reads or believe in these rules, otherwise we won’t be happily married.

—
It’s easy to blame social media for silly rules of thumb. After all, algorithms do reward black-and-white thinking. But social media is just a reflection of society. Before social media even exists, I have often heard older, conservative people trying to impose some sexist/racist rules of thumb to me, like “Don’t marry some from that ethnicity, they are not loyal people” or “If a woman in their 30s are unmarried, there must be something wrong with them”.

Social media only accelerate the spread of these—not only inaccurate, but also—harmful rules of thumb.

Starting from now, let’s treat these takes and rules of thumb as unserious mental shortcuts, not as some gospels or universal truths. When we’re posting, we should remember to add context or nuances as much as we can, even with character limits. And when we’re the one reading these takes, let’s remember the people behind the takes: flawed humans reacting from their past hurts or unique personal experiences.

There have been 3 not-so-painful-but-memorable moments in my life when it comes to writing.

One, is when a close friend told me that my fiction is weird, but my non-fiction is great, so I should stick to non-fiction.

Two, when my thesis supervisor said that my writing is so over-flowery, that it doesn’t fit the academia.

Three, when my former supervisor pointed me to a “How to Write Better” guide so I can write more effectively.

My ego has been crushed multiple times, and it’s not due to these people’s fault. I grew up loving stories, fairy tales, and poems so much that writing is the very first hobby I strongly identify with. To have someone tell you something around “you’re not good enough” on an identity you strongly attach to? That’s a commonly painful experience for everyone.

I learned over time to detach myself from the identity. I said to myself, “Writing is just something I do. It’s something most people who likes to read, or are sufficiently educated, do. Nothing is special about it”.

I moved on with my life, not ever publishing anything worthy except for some political Instagram posts and love poems.

—

About a month ago, I resigned from my job. I’ve been going back to freelance consulting since, and in between my consulting projects, I do what many unemployed people with computer and internet access do: become an AI trainer. It’s a little embarrassing to me to admit this on the Internet, to be honest. I told my husband, “how come an Ivy League grad like me ends up doing a job that everyone is doing?”. For those who have never worked as an AI trainer, it is basically a remote, flexible job where you’re assigned to a task to identify whether an LLM output is an AI slop or not.

But the embarrassment only passed my thoughts for a few seconds, because the money is good. Oh yeah, it’s good, especially if you already have professional experience or specific expertise, and you register to a high-paying platform at the right time. Aside from the money, I am proud to say I am quite good in detaching myself from any identity. Like, yeah, an Ivy League degree, who cares? It’s part of a rat race/hedonic treadmill mindset to think that we are only allowed prestigious jobs once we have prestigious degrees.

Now, here is the funny part. I’m learning so much more about writing when I work as an AI trainer. In the assigned tasks, I was asked to judge an LLM output based on its writing quality. For example, an excessive use of semicolons or em dashes is automatically considered a slop. Uses of vague and meaningless terms are slops. Unnatural languages? Slop. Abstract terms? Slop. Slogan-like writing? Slop. Over-flowery writing? Slop.

I see now why my former supervisor told me to read the “How to Write Better” guide.

All this time, I’ve been writing slops, as a human.

—

This encounter with AI training tasks humbled me. I have not been good at writing, after all. For this article, I almost used the word “employ” in one of the sentences, but the AI training material got to me, and I replaced it with the word “do”, which is a simpler, more natural alternative.

I have not been good at writing, but here’s what I know: I have been writing because I like observing, I like communicating ideas, I like sharing my vulnerabilities, I like that publishing something often means freezing a moment in time.

I’d like to keep writing, not as a writer, just as a human who shares with the world. And, in between, I’ll be grinding my keyboard, checking things off two boxes: ☐ slop ☐ not slop.

Before this, I never really experienced burnout. Exhaustion, yes, but not burnout. When I overworked, usually I just got sick: GERD, fever. I took a few days of rest (including being hospitalized), but I never lost my drive.

This time is different. Not only do I lose any motivation to excel, I also lose any desire for better opportunities.

I used to be excited by the word “growth”. Now, imagining that I have to prove my worth to people from the higher-ups makes me ill.

I’m experiencing something I would call “a fundamental burnout”.

My body is tired from having to outsource my worth over and over again to people whose opinions I don’t care about; from having people above me determine if I’m good enough or not. I’m tired of being scrutinized, of having one misstep or a bad week determining my whole “performance”. I’m tired of being reduced to labels like “high performer”, “low performer”, “low potential”.

I’m tired of always having to rely on my intrinsic motivation when the reserves are running low, and, on top of that, to be subtly asked not to care too much about extrinsic motivators like money.

I’m tired of doing, rather than being.

I’m tired of people telling me that I should detach, that work is just work, that the reason I’m burned out is because I can’t set boundaries. What if caring, even about the smallest things, is my second nature? It’s like success demands me not to be myself.

I’m tired of working under the capitalistic system where productivity equals self-worth. At the same time, the definition of “productivity” is made to be narrow: sitting in front of a computer to produce something.

—

How to get out of this rut called fundamental burnout? I’m still figuring it out.

I just know that to rest isn’t enough. There needs to be a complete overhaul in how I see myself, how I see success, and how I put God in the middle of all these.

I’m not yet there, but I’m on my way.

It happened twice; once in 2023 and once again three days ago. Right after a pilates session, I suddenly felt an enormous amount of despair, like life has no purpose.

It lasted for four hours. It got better after I shower and watch a Chinese comedy film.

A sensible person would say, “It’s probably because pilates is heavy and you’re just tired”. It could be true, but as someone less sensible, I chose to look things up on Reddit and found that it’s not an uncommon experience.

People attribute the tears and feelings of despair to one thing: somatic release.

They (and, by they, yogis are also included) always say this all the time: you store your trauma in your hips. And when we do certain hip-opening moves or poses, the stored trauma gets released and overwhelms our nervous system.

—

I’m a big believer in how trauma may impact our bodies long-term. I just thought that I’ve gotten over or overcome my life’s worst events, so post-pilates tears will no longer be on the table.

Apparently, I might be wrong. But, I also can’t pinpoint what could have caused the despair. If opening my hip was the trigger, what was the root cause?

At the same time, I’m thinking to myself: maybe I don’t really need to know, I just need to release them.

—

In contrast, swimming always makes me feel joyful. Even when I feel tired or sleepy after, swimming infuses me with optimism and energy to do the most challenging tasks.

In fact, I’m writing this after I swim. Words flow out of my brain so seamlessly. All those waters did something to me.

Swimming feels like play, pilates feels like hard work, like having to do something because I have to, not because I want to.

Swimming probably also brings me back to the best times in my childhood and teenage years.

Swimming probably calms the fire in me; pilates just aggravates them.

—

It could be that I was just tired and need a shower. But writing this helps learn something about myself: when in doubt, go to the waters. Swim, make wudhu, shower, book a trip to the seaside. Everything will be fine.

Throughout my career, I’ve heard tons of complaints from friends, colleagues, and strangers about managers who micromanage. They have one of the worst reputations in the workplace. They’re described as managers who check on you every hour, give feedback down to the tiniest details, and even interfere with your personal life.

But I rarely hear complaints about the opposite of micromanagement, which is managers who barely manage at all.

While being micromanaged is indeed a painful experience no one wants to repeat, I think we don’t pay enough attention to managers who don’t do anything. They don’t give you clarity (not specific instructions, not even high-level direction). They let you figure things out on their own in the name of empowerment, but it actually means all the mental load of deciding what to do/how to do it is yours to carry. You make their work easier, but they don’t make your work easier. Rather than serving as a translator between the higher-ups and you, they only act like a mailman; forwarding directions from above and reporting back what you’ve done.

I think this is our bias, not just at work, but in many contexts. People who don’t do anything often get blamed less. Of course, because taking action and making decision mean you’re showing up and making yourself vulnerable to criticism. It’s easy to dodge accountability by not doing anything.

—

I started writing this as a personal observation, but it turns out research also backs up my observation, at least in some contexts. I found this article by Scott Gregory from Hogan Assessment, citing multiple studies on the impact of absentee leadership. A study in 2010 in Norwegian context shows that, laissez-faire or absentee leadership was the most common destructive leadership behavior. Another study cited by Gregory shows that “being ignored by one’s boss is more alienating than being treated poorly.”

I’m quoting from Scott Gregory’s article here:

If absentee leadership is so destructive, why don’t we read more about it in the business literature? Consider a story I recently heard about the dean of a well-known law school: Two senior, well-regarded faculty members called the provost to complain about their dean because, they said, he wouldn’t do anything. The provost responded by saying that he had a dean who was a drunk, a dean who was accused of sexual harassment, and a dean who was accused of misusing funds, but the law school dean never caused him any problems. So, the provost said, the faculty members would just have to deal with their dean.

Like the provost in this example, many organizations don’t confront absentee leaders because they have other managers whose behavior is more overtly destructive. Because absentee leaders don’t actively make trouble, their negative impact on organizations can be difficult to detect, and when it is detected, it often is considered a low-priority problem.

— Scott Gregory on The Most Common Type of Incompetent Leader

I imagine someone complaining about absentee leader would feel invalidated when their complaint is not considered important enough.

—

Weirdly, I don’t think we apply the same logic to childrearing. The parents who micromanage are considered good, involved parents. Even if the parenting involves hitting and yelling, it is still considered a better parenting than parenting that is mostly neglectful. Leaving your child alone in the car, at the house? Instant judgment from people. Mothers working and not spending as much time with their children? Bad mothers. But overly involved parenting is simply seen as an act of caring; hitting/yelling are seen as occasional err from parents whose intent is to educate.

Why do we have these double standards?

A 2016 study at UC Irvine found that society’s outrage over “parental neglect” is often driven by moral judgment rather than actual danger. The study says that, statistically, it’s much more dangerous for children to be in a moving car than to be left alone playing in a park. So judgment on parents who do not constantly supervise their child likely comes from a moral standard, rather than assessment of actual risk.

Why don’t we apply some of this thinking to leadership? Why does an absent leader often look less evil than micro-managers? Not to equate parenting with managing a bunch of adults, but aren’t both, in their own ways, forms of leadership? When does involvement equal care and when does it equal harm? And what about non-involvement?

—

Managing adults is indeed not parenting. But, growing up doesn’t erase our need for clarity and support. We just need them in different forms.

I don’t want to put too much importance to our work life as I don’t want to promote the capitalist hellscape lifestyle. But we still spend one-third of our day at work and it can be something that primarily affects our well-being.

We criticize micromanagers so much that we have made leaders afraid of micromanagement. And then they normalize its opposite extreme. We should start calling a spade a spade. Abandonment is not empowerment. Neglect is not freedom. Absent leaders are bad leaders.

I was doomscrolling on Threads this morning when I read a post from a stranger, saying that we shouldn’t loosely encourage someone to simply leave their job without being honest about conditions that enable someone to do it. The poster mentioned a few enabling conditions: emergency fund or year-long savings, having another person paying for your living cost, and having hireable expertise, among others.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s been three weeks since my last day at my last job, and I’ve started and experimented on a TikTok account since. I started wanting to posts stuff within my niche: personal development and career growth. As I’m posting more and more stats are coming in, the content that performs best that talk about resigning (what to do before resigning, things to keep in mind before leaving a job). I joked about it to my friend the other day, “It seems like everyone wants to resign these days”.

I don’t blame people for feeling sick of the capitalist hellscape, but my conscience says I shouldn’t capitalize on people’s feelings for the sake of TikTok engagement. There’s not enough space on TikTok to talk about resignation with enough nuances. I don’t want to romanticize unemployment, because this is not my first time not having an office job, but this is the most prepared I’ve been. I’ve been unemployed before, for a few months, and it wasn’t the best time of my life. There were time when I struggled and my only focus was to get the next job.

This time, I’m more prepared, and I want to be honest about what makes it possible:

1. I had a year to prepare. I’ve thought about leaving my job for quite a long time, and for the past year, I’ve exercised different financial scenarios in my head, from the best to worst case. Within that year, I also got into multiple conversations with my husband on how things would look like in our household if there is only one person with stable income, which brings me to my second point.

2. My husband pays for majority of the bills. It sounds convenient, and that’s why I have to be honest about it. But as generous as my husband is, I can’t let him pay for my personal debt (which is an ongoing mortgage). Fortunately.. (to my third point)..

3. I’ve worked long enough to have enough BPJS-JHT (a pension fund in Indonesia that you can cash out) balance which I’m going to use to pay for my mortgage’s monthly installment for at least a year. What happens after a year, then? See my fourth point.

4. I used to run an independent HR consulting business that I’m now reviving. Before resigning, I had secured one retainer client, which pays for my monthly bare minimum living cost. Now that I don’t have office job, I actually have more time to sell my practice and build my client base, which I hope will cover for my mortgage moving forward. What’s also helping is…

5. I have built some audiences on Threads and LinkedIn. I yap endlessly on Threads and used to yap on LinkedIn also in the past, so anytime I want to go back to my consulting practice, one of the ways I can build client base is to consistently post in these two platforms. Posting on LinkedIn has been proven to bring many leads in the past, but it was a different time and algorithm four years ago, so we can only see how it goes. But, whatever happen, I also have…

6. Passive income from renting out my condo. My sister is the renter (LOL), so she basically pays me monthly at a below-market rate, a total win-win.

BUT, despite all the enabling conditions I had, it still took courage to do it. I don’t want people to look at the list above and think that courage comes naturally from these privileges. I gathered my courage to resign by thinking about all the work I could’ve done, and things I could’ve built if only I had more time. I rewired my brain to focus on opportunities and possibilities from having all that time and space to do different things, and that’s what eventually convinced me to take the leap of faith.

AND, I’ve seen people who have left their job with a lot less preparation and still managed to make things work in the end, so I don’t want to downplay the impact of pure faith and grit. I also relied on them a lot in my previous unemployment periods, when I had none of the things in the list.

I wish everyone who’s thinking of leaving—or starting something new—the best of luck!

I have a Premium Claude Subscription (that I wanted to cancel), but then I forgot to cancel it and I got charged another $20 for this month.

Since it’s already paid, I’m thinking of ways I can utilize it this month. Since I commit to writing on my Substack fully without AI, I won’t use it for creating articles’ rough drafts from scratch, but I can still use it moderately, for some activities where AI truly adds value.

Just last night, I launched a new website for my people consulting business (see it here), using only Claude Pro, Github, and Vercel. It took me only 2 days; no coding required. But I have also practiced by making two websites with AI before that, so I got better at vibe coding over time (anyway, if you want to learn more about how to use Claude to build things, I highly recommend Tayla Burrell’s Substack).

Before this, I also used Claude Pro to do audience research for both my people consulting business and my TikTok account. I used a prompt recommended by Tayla Burrell in one of her articles. The prompt asked Claude to scour the Internet (Reddit, X, and many other forums/channels) to find audience pain points and form an audience persona that I can refer to to develop my messaging and content.

But using AI intensively has almost kicked me into an existential crisis before, so I need to tread carefully this time. Here are some of my personal principles in using AI so that I don’t lose my humanity:

1. Never, ever use AI to create your first draft.

No matter how tempting and time-saving it is to have AI make your first draft, just don’t do it. As a human, your collective experiences are what build your unique perspective, and having AI develop your first draft will dull your thinking. The first draft, produced by AI, no matter how good, will be your anchor for thinking moving forward, and it shouldn’t be. The anchor and the base reference for everything should be your original thought, and AI can help with the iterations.

2. Do not ever outsource your taste to AI.

When it comes to doing web designs or generating any kind of visual outputs, my principle is to not have AI take the first stab. I usually still do the manual process of developing mood boards, determining brand colors, fonts, and styles, before asking AI to develop a design. Like a normal person, I use Pinterest and Dribbble for inspirations. After I’m done with my mood board, only then will I start asking AI to design something, using the mood board as the reference. This way, not only will you keep your humanity, it will also prevent you from having generic, obnoxious design that people will instantly recognize as AI-generated.

3. If you don’t know what to write/make, maybe spend a little time to read more, meet more people, experience life.

Anything worth creating must stem from day-to-day human experience. In college, I had a writing job where I had to write 3 articles a day, and sometimes I felt so stuck, I had no topics to propose. To get unstuck, I went out for coffees with friends or read books outside my usual genres or just sit somewhere and people-watch. Ideas flowed so easily after that, because I engaged with the real world.

So if you’re really stuck, the immediate solution is not to ask AI to write/make things for you. Maybe the immediate solution is to live your life.

—

Bottom line:

• When it comes to writing, use AI as a thinking partner, not a creator

• When it comes to visual outputs, use AI as an executor, not a thinking partner

I know the rules sound inconsistent, but these are my personal principles. Everyone can make their own rules, according to how they use AI day-to-day.

But when the temptation is already huge, what helps me is remembering how much water this technology consumes. That usually works to keep my AI use in moderation.

There is something that always calms me down every time I feel restless: having a plan. I would spend 30 minutes making a to-do list, visualizing all possible scenarios in a mind map, making a table comparing plan A, B, and C. After that process, I get a sensation that I have my life together, and I can calmly go watch TV.

I plan to gain control, or, at the very least, an illusion of control. But, speaking from experience, I know most of my plans will change, pivot, or not work out at all.

—

When I was little, one of my favorite book series was Enid Blyton’s St. Clare’s series. There was a character called Mirabel Unwin, who arrived at the St. Clare’s boarding school but told everyone that she hated the school and planned to eventually leave. But the school and the people started to rub off on her; she started enjoying the school, but insisted on leaving anyway because she had made up her mind. To her, changing your mind was a sign of weak principles.

But another character (I think it was a teacher/headmaster) told her that a principled person is also someone who is willing to change her mind when a new information, that points to a different direction, is presented. So Mirabel caved in and followed her heart, and she thrived as a student in St. Clare.

—

This story probably shaped me more than I realized. I just don’t want to be someone who doesn’t change when it’s time to change. But it can look like inconsistency from the outside. A former colleague told me he struggled to work with me because I keep changing my mind; I didn’t see it as inconsistency, but more like a practice of exercising multiple ideas, experimenting, and seeing what actually sticks in the long run (a practice I’ve since learned is best kept personal, as not everyone enjoys watching a thought process happen in real time). Funnily enough, I took the Big 5 Personality Test and my “openness to experience” trait score is so high. Maybe it’s both my blessing and my undoing.

—

Here are some of my major plans that did not work:

1. I planned to stay in my last job for 5 years; aiming for the Manager position, and saving enough money to pay 80% of my mortgage. I ended up staying for 4 years, paying only 60% of my mortgage, and did not make the Manager position. I overestimated my ability to endure a cushy job (especially with mortgage in the background) and underestimated my inclination to do things that feel meaningful and engaging to me.

2. I wanted to get married young, but looking back, it was such an unrealistic wish because I was nowhere ready to be married. I met my soulmate when I was 25, but it took us a few years to work on ourselves and figure out whether we really really want to be together, so we got married two months before I turned 30 (which was like my plan C in life). But I wouldn’t have it any other way. In this case, there was no overestimation/underestimation. I just had a lot of unknowns unknowns about myself, and life surprised me a lot.

3. I wanted to get pregnant immediately after marriage, but God, I no longer have illusion of control about this. An OB/GYN checked my uterus via ultrasound and said my uterus is so healthy-looking, but I seem to have “poor blood circulation” (?) and need to exercise more and lose my weight to increase my chance of pregnancy. People keep telling me “uterus is God’s area” and implantation is a game of biological chance. So I’m doing my best to control what I can control, but also try to detach from the outcome. I used to feel like a failure every time I get my period, now I no longer do.

—

By now, it’s becoming more and more clear to me why I like to plan, even though the utility of planning is becoming more and more questionable. I plan to give my life a high-level direction, a North Star. The mechanisms, logistics, the how, the timeline, are flexible. Even the sub-goals are. Only the high-level goal should not be; it should be dead set.

And if I can spend 30 minutes to 1 hour every few days or week creating and adjusting my plan around a goal, that means the goal matters that much to me. Planning works less like actual planning and more like a litmus test to see if something is really worth pursuing.

I will keep making my to-do list, my mind maps, my comparison tables, knowing full well they will keep changing, and at least half of them will not materialize. But they’re all part of the important conversations I have with myself; as long as I’m still making them, I know I’m heading somewhere that matters to me.

1. It may not get better than this, but it can get different.

2. I used to feel that my world is big, now it feels so small for reasons I can’t yet comprehend.

3. My therapist said I can’t think like a child who wants everything but doesn’t want any risk to my decisions. Any choice naturally means letting go of something.

4. I can’t keep pretending everything is fine when it’s not. My nervous system doesn’t lie. It’s rejecting work; I have nausea every time I rant about work to a friend.

5. My husband said I should trust my intuition when something feels off; and no need to rationalize it immediately.

6. A friend told me once, “if it’s too hard, let it go”.

7. A friend said I’ve been saying “I’m dead inside” for two months now.

8. I have been applying for jobs relentlessly to no avail.

9. I eventually got one job offer with a cool title, but I turned it down because imagining myself in that role already feels tiring.

10. I have explored possibilities for moving to another role instead of resigning, but none of the potential role excites me.

11. It’s cliched, but God will provide.

12. The world would neither punish me for making a bad decision, nor would it reward me for making a good decision. The world is neutral.

13. I was constipated (until I sent in my resignation letter).

I used to know who I’m writing for, who my audience is. When I was in my early 20s, I was writing for my peers who’s entering the workforce for the first time as me. I was writing for those working in tech and creative roles; how we navigated productivity tools and hustle culture. I was writing during the startup boom; when opportunities were limitless, new companies popping up every day, people could negotiate salary, and people of my age were promoted to VPs in a short amount of time.

I stopped writing frequently for a while for many reasons, but coming back into writing is hard because I have changed so much and I no longer know who I’m writing for. I no longer use tech bro’s writings as my bible for best practices in company building. We had the pandemic and the world has a different arrangement now. I still have male friends but I can no longer relate to them as much because I have my own specific female experience. My female friends mostly have kids and I can not relate to them fully until I have a kid on my own. I enter a room full of much younger people and they see me as a stereotypical married aunty. With the world being on fire, my politics has been going more to the left, but I’m also visibly Muslim in a muslim-majority country, where defending LGBTQ’s rights for peaceful co-existence means inviting trolls to question my hijab. Most of all, A GENOCIDE happened, and I lost all my trust in everything-Western-world-related.

At the same time, the economy is not going well. And the workplace topics I care about the most (culture, engagement, inclusion) are currently not in the business owners’ top of mind; cost-saving and efficiency are.

The Internet is a vast place, and there must exist one or two corners on the Internet for nuance and unconsolidated identities. My highest-performing posts for the past few years were all political; but is that all I want my voice to be?

—

A friend of mine gave me this advice: you have to move from demographics to psychographics. Actually this is the main lesson in customer segmentation from my four years studying marketing (dang, how did I forget?). She suggested that I just write about what I care about and let the audience form itself.

It sounds like a good advice, it’s just going against all the tips out there that says “write with an audience in mind”. But it’s the best direction I have for now.

—

My late father never wanted me to be a writer writer. He thinks the best writers have conventional careers and build their writings around those worlds. His primary example is, of course, John Grisham, who built a successful legal and politics career before writing highly-successful courtroom fictions.

I also want a conventional career, but conventional career doesn’t seem to want me (or my nervous system) at this point. So I have no choice but to grind my keycaps for now; with the hope of finding myself (and a ideal audience profile) along the way.

I first learned about the term ‘opportunity cost’ in my Introduction to Economics class. The term has become more popular these days, with the rise of popular economics. To make sure we’re on the same page, I’m copying the formal definition here.

Opportunity cost: The value of the next-best alternative you give up when making a choice, representing missed benefits, time, or financial gains.

One of my lecturers warned his students a long time ago: “don’t make a single scientific lens your whole lens to see the world”. I’m still applying his advice to my life until now, but sometimes I just forget this wisdom exists. My use of opportunity cost concept should have stopped in classrooms and boardrooms, but I carry it into my daily life decisions.

Knowing that a next-best alternative exists and can become missed chances, most of my life I feel restless, like I should be doing something else someplace else. The only time I didn’t feel this way was during my 18 months in Ithaca, New York, when I was doing my Master’s. There was something about the place (cold, isolated as it was) that made time stand still, forced me to plant my feet firmly on the ground (or, to be more precise, plant my boots in a thick snow) at least until I graduate.

But months before returning to Jakarta, all that stillness went out of the window. I started to feel restless again. Because after graduation, I felt like I have to optimize my life, make the most optimal decision, and obviously minimize opportunity cost.

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There are at least two possible explanations of why I feel restless from time to time, and interestingly both can be described using opportunity cost as a framework:

1. That the choices I’m making are not yet the best alternative; rather, it’s just the next-best alternative. If it’s the best alternative, I would feel content with it and not always thinking about being someplace else doing something else. If this explanation is true, then taking my Master’s study was already the best alternative; no other option can match it at that time.

2. That no one, including me, would freaking know what a best alternative is. Because this is life, a multi-factorial life, and not some business and economic decisions. And that the source of my modern discontent is simply because I internalize the concept of opportunity cost too much.

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Some people would probably read this piece and say that I’m taking too long making sense of a problem that has been widely explained by experts, that we’re simply living in times of social media and comparisons and information overload, and that’s why we never feel enough, that we just have to cultivate mindfulness and trust that God is putting us here, now, in a place, at a role, with people, we’re meant to be in, at, with.

But it’s not just it, isn’t it? It’s not just about comparisons.

Tendency for social comparison is easy to ignore and unlearn; it’s the mindset of life optimization that is at the core of this. And the understanding of opportunity cost—an understanding that a next-best alternative exists—is what keeps feeding this mindset.

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Where did my obsession with optimization come from? My hypothesis was that it came from consuming productivity content and spending years around tech bros (LOL).

Because, I never see myself as a naturally sensible person; or at least, that’s how my Mom sees me. She always has this worry that I will end up being a struggling artist despite my straight A’s because I have too many interests, have my eyes set upon many things, and just generally ungovernable. A good friend would say that my Mom’s perception of me is inaccurate, because she sees me as a disciplined and rational person.

But my ‘discipline’ and ‘rationality’ are all learned behaviors; adopted from my education and training. Studying econ/management taught me to always weigh pros and cons (and to have “Risks and Mitigation” section in all my life strategy’s slide decks). My Mom’s constant effort to structure my life has saved me from vices that would disable me from functioning in society (and, of course, the industry).

When I’m tired, overworked, burned out, fatigued, or just generally beaten down, I strip myself of these learned structures and go back to my default: following my heart relentlessly, unapologetically.

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Eventually, I found a workaround for this constant restlessness, without throwing away my innate understanding of opportunity cost, which is to ask this fundamental question:

“What am I optimizing for?”.

And, maybe, right now, I optimize following my heart.

If there’s one thing I despise, it’s being told what to do.

My parents have always known this all along, and like many parents, in the past, that made them even more pulled to tell me what to do.

When I studied management in undergrad, I heard this advice a lot, “If you want to be successful, you have to be coachable”.

I interpreted this as, ‘Oh, maybe then to be successful, I need to get better at being told what to do’.

Apparently, I never got better at it. I did some things well and some things badly throughout my career. The things I did well, I did well partly because I discovered how to do them on my own, and partly because someone gave me good suggestions that I adopted.

Does that mean I’m coachable? At that time, I thought of it as me just being influence-able.

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I had an encounter with an actual coaching when I was 25. My boss assigned my team a coach; the coach had a 1:1 session with each of our team members separately.

I thought he would tell me what to do. Turns out he didn’t.

He instead helped me give language to my natural strengths and discussed with me ways I can use these strengths to make my work more visible.

I also hear this from society all the time: a good woman, a good wife must be teachable, coachable, trainable. I dated a guy once who always said I’m not teachable.

And then I met my husband and I thought he will try to teach me things also.

But turns out he did not. He simply likes talking to me, spending time and doing activities together. If I do stupid things that do not serve us both, he holds me accountable, but he never try to train, coach, or teach me.

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I realized it now, that I am a very coachable person. That I am easily influenced by people who make sense. That I will make efforts, go beyond the miles for other people, strive to do the right thing, even without anyone telling me what to do…

…if they just let me be.

In graduate school, in a Leadership Development class, a classmate raised a memorable question to the professor “What do you think about the two different approaches to personal growth: one is growth mindset (the belief that you can expand yourself) and another is strengths-based (playing to your natural strengths)?”.

I don’t really remember the professor’s answer. But over time, I draw my own conclusion: these two approaches are not opposites. Growth mindset actually works best when built on a foundation of strengths and when we take into account our limitations.

I really like strengths-based approach to life. I took CliftonStrengths assessment back in around 2015 and really took the results seriously. My top 5 strengths were Input, Intellection, Ideation, Learner, and Individualization. I uploaded my assessment report to GPT and it summarized it like this: “You quickly absorb complex information and think deeply about underlying patterns. Your natural curiosity, love of learning, and ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas are complemented by a genuine sensitivity to individual differences.”

I have designed my life around my strengths ever since; I intentionally pick jobs/careers that utilize those strengths, and use my Individualization strengths to form strong relationships. But what I often don’t like to admit to people is that I also design my life around my limitations.

• It’s really, really hard for me to function without an 8-hour sleep (more than most people). Sleeping at 11 PM already ruins my circadian rhythm. I run when I see commitments that require me to lose my sleep (unless, maybe, having a child, which upsides seem to outweigh the downsides for me).

• I’m sensitive to rejections/criticisms, but daily rejections are indeed inevitable, so at the very least I’m trying to make sure I’m around kind people most of the days.

• I get super restless when people don’t respond to my messages within 1 hour, so I literally pursued my husband because he almost always responds to my messages quickly 😋, thus making me feel secure.

• I can’t sustain exercises that do not engage me mentally. If I force myself, I will end up hating exercise, so I choose dance as my go-to exercise because it stimulates me mentally (from trying to memorize the moves).

I used to see these limitations as weaknesses, but weaknesses have a more negative connotation. Now I prefer to think of these simply as my unique traits, that I have to build guardrails around them in order to thrive.

I believe in growth mindset too; heck, it will be wrong not to. Because then that would give people excuse to stay, not just in stagnancy, but also their most corrupt state. But I don’t think we can grow well from a place of non-strengths, or from a place that amplifies our limitations. I think even the most challenging growth has to take into account both strengths and limitations.

My husband, for instance, is a serious runner. He has not been on his ideal weight for years, so he lifted regularly to manage his weights. When he started running, he had little advantage because he definitely isn’t lean. BUT he has muscles from all those years at the gym. The muscles make him a strong runner, making him less prone to injury. He ran marathons and kept making progress in his finish time despite not having the typical runner’s body because he played to his strengths. Does he also manage his limitations? Yes, he’s watching his diet now to get leaner so he can be a more efficient runner; but he knows it’s not going to be his greatest advantage, so he switches between gym and running every two days.

In my case, I used to explode (in anger) so easily. In the spirit of growth mindset, I’m improving my emotional regulation through multiple means. But, in the spirit of acknowledging my limitations, I’m also managing my “explosion potential” by avoiding my triggers as much as I can. I am slightly more mindful not to deliberately insert myself into conversations that I know would anger me.

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My key takeaway is this: in this wave of growth mindset, well-intentioned people might actually take it too far, and be too hard on themselves when they’re not growing as fast as they want to. But it’s harder to grow without first appreciating your unique traits (both the strengths and limitations). And maybe growth is not the whole point, maybe living in alignment is.

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Further reading: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-strengths-based-development-trumps-weakness-fixing-manie-bosman

It’s funny how our relationship with AI and working have changed so rapidly over the past year. Back in 2024, I was using ChatGPT for occasional email writing/editing, and I hid it from my colleagues and bosses. I made sure no one knew I relied on a machine.

There was one time when I was writing a proposal at work, and I truly didn’t know what to write for certain sections. I used free GPT to write two paragraphs and they were so BAD, but I was desperate. It ended up getting comments from my teammates who were so confused on what I intended to write.

Over time, Generative AI quality has improved. I started subscribing to paid ChatGPT, which produced better outcomes, albeit still overly dramatic. I happily relied on Gemini for coding works (Gemini seems like a much more rational person, while GPT is like your dramatic relative who overexaggerate everything at family events). And then came Claude, the superior being who makes you sound and look 10x more professional (at first) but then you realized it uses similar style of design for everything and does not actually write that well either.

I used to pride myself for my originality, for being different, for coming up with strong write-ups after hours of doing my own desk research and readings. And I know I CAN STILL do them. In fact, it’s encouraged because we can’t trust AI 100%, but with GenAI making it soooo easy, it’s hard to force myself to really do the required manual work. Why would I wash my clothes with hands when I have washing machine (even when some clothes are better handwashed)?

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Now there is no longer shame in using AI. In fact, they’re encouraged, for efficiency (that advantage, though, is still debatable). There has been discussions about how AI’s making us dumber, and I believe it to be true. It’s not just my intelligence’s eroding, it’s also my work ethics. I know that I would be more satisfied with my work if I don’t use AI at all, but also GenAI is like a siren (hats to The Odyssey) seducing you to use it, singing “♬♪ Come on, just copy your texts here, polish them a bit 🎶”.

AI use is even more unavoidable when we have so many tasks to do. I can’t wait to check things off my list, so better onboard the help of GenAI to do all these tasks, so I would still have time to chill after work. The thing is a wide use of AI gives us an illusion that our workload is normal, while it is not.

At my work, I used to spend a whole day listening to five interview recordings to check if they’re administered properly. Now, since Gemini can already listen to recordings and produce the transcripts for me, it took me no more than 3 hours, but that doesn’t mean Gemini’s output is better than mine (I still had to some checkings, which is even more annoying than doing it myself). And since I’m supposed to work 8 hours a day, I have to spend the next 5 hours moving to another task. I personally prefer that I spent the whole day listening to the recordings while being sure the audit is up to my standard, rather than doing 2-3 tasks a day not convinced about the work quality/outcome.

But since everyone else at the team is also becoming more efficient, I have no choice but to also be, right?
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I’m starting this Substack with one intention: that I will what feels truthful to me and I will not use AI at all (including for the header image, that I designed on Canva). I’m so happy that now Substack also uses Pangram so we can check whether a post uses AI or not.

Writing without AI makes me feel like I matter; that my original thoughts matter, that the years I spent learning English and learning how to write matter, that my eclectic reading matter.

I have no doubt that GenAI use will be even more common, as tech bros always get what they want in the name of advancement and progress. But I’m happy to keep this little no-AI corner for myself, a corner that humanizes me.

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I’ve been seeing the same therapist since early 2024. She appreciated me for sticking to sessions every 2-3 weeks in between all my work / personal trips. My therapist lives in Istanbul and we meet online. There were many times when I took the online call from hotel rooms, from my sister’s bedroom in my parents’ house, from a cafe in Jogjakarta, and some other random (somewhat non-confidential) places.

My therapist always notices when I’m traveling, because my call background looks different. In a few sessions early this year, I was constantly complaining to her how bored and under-stimulated I felt; that my life feels like it’s just floating through.

“But you’re always traveling; three different cities in a month. It seems exciting from the outside”, she challenged me.

I think she’s partly true. It could be that I’m just an ungrateful brat who has taken things for granted and doesn’t realize that everyone else’s life is much more boring. But I know that her statement is not wholly correct. I feel what I feel. And my inner reality doesn’t match up to my outer reality.

There are things I always like from traveling. It usually starts with something I don’t like; my husband dropping me off at the airport or train station. I don’t like being separated from him. But the moment I’m in the middle of a bustling airport/station, my excitement starts to go up. It reminds me of my single days, when I had no ‘home’, when opportunities felt endless, when future felt limitless. I happily arrived in airport/station earlier to buy some donuts/coffees, made some unwise purchases at Periplus, and romanticized the wait at the airport.

There are things I always like from traveling. A nice hotel room. Checking the nearest cafes on Google Maps, visiting the one that looks most legit, and actually liking it. Buying keepsakes. Keeping non-keepsakes like a pretty admission ticket to a peranakan house or a rustic coaster from a coffee house. Knowing that my office pays for at least two-third of my expenses.

But trips are just trips. They are but a stop, an entertainment, a distraction, an escape, a means to an end, a vehicle to a goal.

But what is the goal?

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It can be offensive to whine about how “boring” my life is when I literally just came back from an overseas business trip, with another local trip planned the following week. I think people will understand if I complain about being “tired”. But that is not what I complained about.

And as a person whose first tendency is to judge myself, I judged myself. I called myself a brat, multiple times. But my curiosity came to my rescue (my Instagram bio now says “proponent of radical self-inquiry” and that, I would say, the best side of me that continues to save me over and over again). At one point, judging myself no longer works. How do you turn a brat to a non-brat? That doesn’t work.

Because I was never a brat at the first place, I was just a person pursuing the wrong goal.

The life with the endless trips are fun, but they’re not taking me closer to what I’m called out to do; learnings things and making sense of what I learn in public, turning my personal chaos into public reflections, writing, writing, and writing.

The life with the endless trips took me away from my default setting.

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I want my life to be exciting. But I’m not the type of person who finds excitement from external stimulation or engagement with the material world.

My excitement has always been intrinsic. Even when I’m overly-stimulated by books or films or Netflix binges, it is not the consumption per se that excites me, it is how my thoughts engage with them; it’s how I connect the stories with my own narratives, with my life’s problems, with societal issues.

By the time I am reminded of this tendency, things click; of course traveling can bore me, because it’s not about the trip, it’s about what the trip means, and whether the trips engages me mentally and take me closer to my default self.

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