Repeating same mistakes

About a year and a half ago I experienced quite a lot of stress and anxiety due to my financial situation. I was making okay money as a developer but it still was at the low end of the salary in the industry. I was spending almost all of my salary and had almost no savings.

I had been in similar or even worse financial distress for the past five years while trying to make it as a self-taught programmer. But now it was different because at this point in my life, I felt like I had made it: I had a stable job with an okay salary, a nice apartment, and a long-term place to live. I was feeling that I was not struggling anymore whereas, for the last five years, I was constantly changing countries and cities, moving frequently. So the years before felt more like a survival struggle but that gave me more energy to keep working on things and the money didn’t feel much of an issue if the basics were covered because I always thought it would get better in the future.

For some reason, now that I had stability in my life, I started to feel a lot of stress about my financial situation. Maybe it was because I realized I wouldn’t get better anymore from what I had at the moment. After all, the current situation was a big milestone already so I couldn’t soothe my anxiety with tales of a better future.

But this is not the point of the story the interesting part is what I did next. While under emotional distress, I came up with a plan to fix it: I decided to get a freelance gig or contract work to make extra income in addition to my current full-time job. My idea was to work 6-7 hours at my current job and do 5-6 hours of freelance work in the evenings. Initially, it felt like a crazy thing to do but hey in crazy times you fall to crazy means. And so that is what I did. It was difficult to find a freelance gig I spent two months searching and was losing hope that I would be able to find one. In the end, I landed quite a good deal with a company that offered me a role as a contractor. With the salary even a bit higher than what I was making at my current job. Success! I thought. I was counting the amount of money I would soon be making and couldn’t believe it.

The contract with the new company would start in 3 weeks after the final “yes” from them. During that time I was still not sure if I would be able to pull it off because it would be a hell lot of work after all. But the distress of my current situation and the prospect of future money piles subdued any doubts. When the contract start day came, I was so excited just from the novelty and craziness of it all. After the first day, I realized it was not as bad as I thought because a start in any new job or role is a quite slow and easy process, usually, the first month or so is smooth sailing because you just familiarize yourself with everything and there are no hard problems to solve and no deadlines looming yet.

After the first month, finally, the piles of money came as I was getting paid my regular salary and now also the fee for my contract services. What an amazing day it was! Only then did I start to believe that “okay, maybe it is realistic and not just insane.” Now this probably was the peak experience I was happy and all excited, and from here it was only downhill. Because something weird happened after the second month: now that I was getting all this extra cash in my bank account, my financial situation was looking better than ever. The trajectory, if I kept going like this for a year, was unbelievable—something I couldn’t have imagined only two months ago when I started the search for a second job. But it seems that sometimes the perceived future trajectory downward or upward can have lots of effects on oneself. I guess the human brain perceives plausible future outcomes as already gained even if you are not there yet and makes you act in weird ways. And start acting weird I did. I started to derail from my original plan to save money because now I was a rich king or at least I thought so.

My initial goal was to keep working like this for a year and save as much money as possible and after a year with a big fat bank account get back to normal one job life stress-free and rich. In the first two months I didn’t feel like handling two jobs was difficult I was working long days and that was pretty much what I did just work long days in front of a computer, go to sleep, and repeat the next days because there was no time for anything, occasionally I managed to slip in one hour of gym time. After two months like this now that I was starting to see the monetary gains from the endeavor it felt like a switch happened in my brain and all of my money stress and anxiety was unfortunately erased. But why “unfortunately” though? Because when that peace of mind came the motivation to hassle and grind went away. And now the long work days of two jobs were starting to get very difficult.

People say you shouldn’t rely on motivation to do things because it will not going to be there every day. But I’m not sure I can entirely subscribe to such a statement. Sure you can habit your way into doing things but when we are talking about 12-14 hour work days for months I think realistically only motivation or obsession can get you through. Hussle and grind is cool but can you sustain yourself like that for months or years? That is something that has not worked for me and when I look at other people who were able to sustain crazy long hard work schedules the internal motivation, enjoyment, flow, or obsession seem to be the main driver not habits or grind. In my observations people who claim very loudly hassle culture benefits are getting their kicks from the hassle itself, their motivator is to be seen as harder or be harder than others. In some weird way, it is not the hassle or grind that makes them do their own work but actually, the motivation and obsession are behind their own work, it just happens that their work is related to hassle marketing.

Okay, so I lost all the motivation to get myself out of a bad financial situation mainly because I was already feeling like I made it by projecting my income year from now. And after that life became very hard. I managed to keep working like that for four more hard and long months and after six months in total of this experiment, I gave in and got back to only having one job. Funny enough I ended up quitting my initial full-time role and moving to full-time for the company I was working as a contractor. Also when I got back to the normal eight-hour work day the workday never ever before seemed so easy in contrast to what I had put myself through for the last six months going back to a normal workday felt like doing a part-time job now. I guess it is some kind of lesson on mental progressive overload.

Unfortunately, after six months of that craziness, I didn’t manage to save much money at all. After the initial two months of being quite disciplined with saving money, I experienced a personality switch and started spending money like a rockstar, even more than before, because I was making much more and could afford to spend more. The only thing that saved me was that I was making quite a lot from my two jobs and was working pretty much all day without going out so I couldn’t physically spend all that I was making.

In the beginning of this journey I was feeling one way and acted accordingly then I was feeling another way and acted accordingly again. Now I consider myself a logical person who thinks over major decisions carefully but where was logic in all of this? Now definitely I spent lots of time deliberately thinking about all of my decisions during that time but it seemed not to make a difference at all. I was acting on my emotions and was logically reasoning behind my actions. If you are familiar with Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow I was driven steadily by “system 1” and “system 2” was explaining why we are going where we are going.

Now this story may have ended right here but a couple of months ago right after a year or so after I started contemplating taking on a second job. I was starting to feel the same stress and anxiety about money again well maybe not as big as before but closer than apart. And what do you think, what was my solution to it? A second job! Seriously again don’t we learn anything from the past? Was I really considering doing the same thing again only after eight short months of burning myself out while doing the same thing? Of course not, because the human mind seems to be very good at finding reasons and explaining anything. Again I was logically going over the situation and making an argument that now this time I will be smarter because I already made the mistake last time. Also, I was thinking maybe this would be a good opportunity to see if I can find a better paid and more enjoyable role because at that time I was already finding a lot of things I didn’t like about my current position and knew I would be moving on to a different company in near future.

After all that reasoning I decided to go ahead and do it and start searching again for a suitable contract position that I could do simultaneously to my day job. The search was again difficult and after a month of trying I was not able to find anything but that period gave me more time to simmer on what I was doing. One thing I realized was although now I was thinking I had valid reasons to do it, but if I were able to find a second job again and put myself through that hellish work life again and start to make more money again, would I find myself in that same emotional state again like I did last time and would I make the same decisions as last time when I felt burned out and gave up on initial idea without managing so save much and not wanting to do it anymore. So I was asking myself, would I be still okay doing it if the outcome were the same as the last time, and how likely is it that the outcome would be the same? Now you can never be sure of the future but I was quite sure if I would find myself in the same emotional position as I did last time while doing the crazy work hours of two jobs I would probably succumb to the same path I did last time.

But doesn’t previous experiences help with not making the same errors? Don’t we learn from our own mistakes? Learning from others’ mistakes is considered something that people need to learn to do and learning of our own mistakes is regarded as something that everybody does naturally. Now in the physical realm when it comes to physical pain surely but in the realm of mental, emotional, and psyche it may be more complicated. Where physical pain seems to leave lessons ingrained in the reptilian part of our brain or nervous system. Imagine the good old example of putting a hand on a hot stove. But when it comes to experiences of different kinds that are farther apart from the comprehension of or reptilian brain these lessons and experiences seem to be more complicated and are subjected to whims of our flawed memory (retrieval and augmentation of it) and our current emotional and hormonal state.

That is why I think that if I would find myself in the same emotional and mental situation that I did last time when I was doing the two jobs endeavor, it probably would be hard to find reasons and motivations to keep doing it after a couple of months again, even if I would look back on my previous experience to convince myself to keep pushing through and make it this time I don’t think it would be enough for me to make through the hard days and months. Here is the realization even when you have past experiences and mistakes to learn from it may be not enough to make you do the right thing this time around. Because if quitting is considered a mistake and keeping going is the right path, but the right path is to endure hardships or stress for months or years there are just too many points of failures during which previous experiences may not be enough or in the midst of struggle you won’t even be able to recall any good reason anymore.

Let’s take quitting smoking as an example the problem with why it is so difficult is that you literally can start doing it again any time of the day. So the potential to fail is literally infinite; it’s 24/7 for the rest of your life. We logically know why it is good to quit smoking and why we should do it; we have all the reasons and logic. But what we don’t have are the supportive emotions, chemicals, and hormones. Or we have them but they unfortunately are playing for the opposite team. Maybe logic and reason are enough to dissuade us from starting to smoke again during the morning or afternoon while we are feeling all good but what happens during these evenings when you are exhausted and tired, left with no willpower and maybe had the worst day in a week, month, year and have received unexpected bad news. This is the problem with having an infinite area of possible break points. Honestly feels like playing a losing game. What you want to do in life is position yourself where the deck is stacked the other way around. Where the area of you succeeding is almost infinite and places of failure are few between through which you can get yourself with willpower or logic.

Here is the thought experiment if you have these two opposite sides: the first is your emotional state and brain chemicals pulling you in one direction and the second side is your “system 2” logic, thinking and memory, pulling you in another direction who is going to win? Well, I think we know the answer to that question from the history of all humankind. Logic, reason, and thinking can of course go a long way and it can save us from not making the same mistakes but when we are at our lowest and exhausted with no energy and willpower left it may not be there to help.

Now fortunately in the case of smoking from personal experience, the emotional distress and craving were not 24/7 and going for infinity of time. These days I don’t think I have any and that is probably the only reason why I haven’t smoked in 4 years. I think if the craving and emotional pain of smoking were still as big as it was in the first week I probably would still be happily puffing my cigarettes.

So here’s my big takeaway. If you make a mistake in the past don’t be so sure that you won’t do it again because this time you will be smarter if the original reasons are present again you may do the same actions. Maybe the previous experience will help with doing it a bit later or not as exactly like last time.

Returning to my original two jobs story, what also played a big role in my decision not to do it again was the knowledge that if the situation got bad and I really needed the money, I could still decide to do it. So in some weird way, what helped me avoid making the same mistake again was not the experience of making the mistake last time, but the knowledge and belief that I gained from previous experience—that I could make extra money if I really needed to. It kind of released and lowered my stress and anxiety about money this time around, made me not make the same mistake. In the end I guess it is not just the raw experience that matters but the knowledge gained and your belief system that gets altered because of experience. You must be a different person the second time around to make different decisions and actions.