🍯 2022 in My Favorite Things
Hey Friends,
Here is another “the end of year”— type of list, where people bullshit about things they have done, seen, experienced, touched, thought of, heard, perceived, analyzed, dramatized and traumatized over in 2022. I am sure you have already have seen and read many of these, but hey, here is another one from yours truly.
This is Caesura by the way, the newsletter about finding focus, but the one that for some reason decides to spam the hell out of your inbox. Thank you for still being subscribed.
Below is a (not) short list of things I liked this year. If you liked some or want to share yours — hit that reply button and let me know.
Show on Netflix: Seinfeld
My favorite show of all time is Scrubs, the one I haven’t rewatched in a while, but started again this month. This year, however, Seinfeld was the show that I re-watched twice and kept returning to, picking random seasons and episodes on Netflix. And surprisingly, I never got tired of it — it gets better with every re-watch as subtle jokes and details become more pronounced.
Seinfeld is the show about nothing — characters that do not try to evolve and demonstrate little ambitions for change. It is a show about everyday hustles turned into drama, because there is no real drama in the show — friends stay friends, no new relationships happen, no one moves out, characters show little evolution over the course of 9 seasons. So that little things, like splitting the bill between friends, become the main action. And that is the magic of this show.
Honorable mention: Community
Music Genre: Grime / UK Hip-hop
I was planning to write about the album I liked the most in 2022, but could not come up with anything. Among the many new releases I listened to, nothing was consistently delivering quality over the course of the entire album. I liked Pusha T’s Its Almost Dry, Bonobo’s Fragments, IDK’s Simple, Joey Bada$$’s 2000 and Beyonce’s Renaissance among many others. None of these, however, survived for long in my playlist.
Rather, I kept being hypnotized and hyped up by the flows of grime artists, a hip-hop from the UK. Previously, grime incorporated a lot of dubstep and was very electronic beats-driven, but in recent years, at least to my observation, the genre creates much more variations in instrumentation and beats. I believe grime now is experiencing something that American hip-hop experienced in early 2010s — the moment of internal saturation, the pause and the last look back before bursting into musical and cultural mainstream landscape. I appreciate grime because of how unique it is in the way it sounds, re-inventing and re-formatting English hip-hop language (for me), the one I thought got very repetitive in the American context.
Artists I listened the most is the first and foremost, Knicks, his album Alpha Place is excellent, and it has 1.35 minutes banger called “Los Pollos Hermanos.” Other artists I kept replaying are Skepta, One Acen, Novelist, AJ Tracey, OTP, Loyle Carter and B Young. Little Simz just released new album this December, but I haven’t had chance to listen to it, but I know she is good as always.
App — Bear
Bear is a note-taking app that I use for all my writings. It is simple, easy to use, have a good notes organization structure (not the best, but good) and most importantly, the one that I stuck to. I tried many productivity and writing apps over the years, the likes of Ulysses, Notions, Apple Notes, Evernotes, Simplenotes and many others. All of them were good, but some were too complex, others — too simple. Bear is simple and fast — I write mainly on laptop, but I capture thoughts and ideas on the mobile app and I go nowhere else if I need to remember something. I spent more time with Bear open on my laptop, than with any other app.
New Habits — Meditations, Budgeting and Exercising in the Mornings
Mediations — I started meditating in the summer, using Headspace app, to which I have corporate subscription. I did not have the urge to meditate, but I kept on reading of many of its benefits and was also experiencing an array of not very pleasant thoughts. I tried it and liked it. It feels like a mental exercise, but not the one that requires hard work and effort, but the one that requires calmness and acceptance of the self. Meditation helps me to filter my thoughts, find mental focus and listen to and understand myself better. Many more people will explain its benefits better than me, but one major thing that meditation taught me is how self-acceptance, rather than struggle against self, can be a foundation for changes we desire.
Budgeting — I never budgeted before, until later in 2022. It always was a boring and at the same time fearful exercise for me, but at some point I decided that I better set a structure and control over how I spend my money, rather be a hostage of overspending. Thanks to my parents, I learned to save, but it was never structured. Thanks to a book called Psychology of Money (I wrote an issue about it here), I decided that its time to get this done and set up a simple system in place, which I am really grateful that I did.
Exercising in the Morning — the problem with the work I have is that it takes too much of my time (no shit, right). I am an owl person, or at least I used to be, and I was never a morning person, and exercising in the morning was a hell for me. But the problem of time management kept persisting, where I after work I would go for a run, then have dinner, which essentially will end my day and I had to stay late in order to do things I really want to do, like writing this newsletter or playing video games. To my utmost resistance, I had no other choice but to start waking up earlier and move workouts to the morning, in order to free my evenings. This happened in December, and it is working so far, which I am surprised about. To be clear, I still literally spend an hour to wake up mentally, but it gets easier and working out before breakfast is becoming more essential part of my day compared to when I exercised in the evening. I hope this habit persists into the future. I do not think that waking up early will get easier, but I do expect that I will get better at managing it.
New Skill — Drawing in Adobe Illustrator
It is funny how something like a learning how to use a software can change the way you perceive the world. I am sucker for good design, for satisfying color palettes and bright colorful graphics. I loved colors since my childhood and any activity related to color selection can take me hours as I enjoy the process. I never really was able to draw properly, but this year decided that computer-assisted digital drawing can help me address that. Learning Illustrator taught me more than anything a visual gramma and visual thinking. I suck at it, I am bad at it, and I just lack imagination to create something graphical and visual (versus it takes me nothing to write up 5k words from a thin air), but I enjoy it and plan on learning more.
Good Break Up — Coffee
Yep, I formalized it, signed the documents, authenticated my signature and sealed the deal — me and coffee parted our ways this year. As of now, it’s been 8 months since I decided to stop drinking coffee. It feels good knowing that whenever I feel energized it is not because of coffee. For some time after stopping sniffing caffeine, feeling energized was not quite possible, especially on runs that I pretty often fueled on coffee shots in the past.
Funnily, now I have developed a bit of distaste for the taste of coffee — the one that I had back in the days, and which I guess I ignored in the same way we ignore the taste of alcohol, because we look beyond the taste, toward the desired state that these drink bring us to.
So here it is, if you have read this far — hope there was something interesting and useful for you.
See ya,
Adil.