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June 3, 2026 1:30 AM

"Being inefficient is my form of luxury"

Simone Giertz is like, my favorite famous person, and she made an instagram post that really resonated with me.

I must get it from my dad. He's always saying to take time, don't rush things. And he takes it farther than I do. If I'm dealing with a task I hate, like paperwork, I definitely want it to be over as quickly as possible. But any time he mentions more paperwork, he always says "whenever you have time." I've never filled out the paperwork too slowly for him.

Wanting the luxury of inefficiency is one of the reasons I quit my job about a year and a half ago. But then I took on two volunteer jobs and I felt the need to go go go to hit my deadlines. And I have spent much of the past year and a half kind of unhappy with that initial decision to quit my well paying job.

So, it's June now. Life is still a little overwhelming, and I have some complicated feelings towards certain aspects of my life. But I think I finally feel happy that I don't have a normal job right now. Yeah, it's taken almost a year and a half to feel this way. And while this isn't one of the reasons I quit, the number one reason why I'm glad I'm not working now is because I'm not forced to use AI.

I did quit my job to be able to work on my projects. My own projects. The Space was not one of them. What Teochew Say was not one of them. I'm still very much committed to them, but I needed to prioritize my projects over these. My own journey in learning teochew. My food blog. This blog.

Just this past week I spent 5 days working on a site revamp for flailing in my kitchen. I barely did anything for The Space or WTCS during those days. But I did practice my teochew every day and I also exercised almost every day. And that all ended up being perfectly okay. I finally got to implement an idea that I had many months ago, and it was so nice to just work on something where I didn't have to worry about what anyone else thought.

I did laundry yesterday. For most of my adult life, I actually really enjoyed doing laundry. I loved folding clothes. But in the past couple of years I grew so tired of it because of how much laundry I was doing. It felt like the hamper would get full in two days, and there would often be some sort of issue with the shared laundry in the building. But I did laundry yesterday. And it also felt okay.

Yeah, I still have bad days. But a cat on a card reminded me that that's okay too.