what is all this?

I’ve always heard about habit enforcement mechanisms: people posting videos of their workouts on social media, money bets that would make an individual lose money if they regressed to their bad habits, or even simple self-rewards if an individual met a certain habit goal of theirs. I’ve never, however, really invested any time or effort into these so-called “habit enforcement mechanisms” myself. There have been a lot of habits that I’ve genuinely wanted to adopt since basically middle school. A few of them have actually stuck but the vast majority have fallen to the wayside; so here I am trying something new. It’s interesting because I’ve always thought about writing a blog but I shudder at the thought of making my personal life public: posting something on the internet feels like a big commitment and this is more so the case when it is regarding issues related to who I am as a person. When you talk to a person face-to-face you get instant feedback about what it is you are saying and you are only talking to one person at one moment in time; things on the internet can reach any stranger at whatever moment in time. I don’t know if I’ve really related my thoughts in the right manner so far (I feel like when I write, it is in general a very disorganized stream of consciousness type of style) but TL;DR: I find posting things on the internet quite scary. This is especially the case after seeing a lot of well put together blogs written by people I really respect: classmates from high school and college, random people I’ve found on the internet, and others who are in places in their lives that I also want to be in.

As such, the main purpose of this blog is not really some place to air out my intimate thoughts on things going on in my life (there might be a few scattered posts here and there, who really knows), but rather a sort of tracker of things I find interesting and discuss what I’ve learned that excites me.

I’m about to head to NYC to start a two-year-long experience (as a research analyst on the DSGE team at the Federal Reserve) where I intend on learning as much as I can before applying to grad school. This blog is meant to keep track of my progress over at least these two coming years.

P.S: Please do not roast me on anything related to grammar. I am sure there will be a lot of mistakes.