I don’t have a 2023 recap unlike my last two years. I said that it was because the year didn’t feel like it had enough going on for it, but mainly because I feel like the next 5 month will be full of introspection and recaps from the last 5 years, that doing a yearly recap feels useless. And so I didn’t write one.

It is currently 6 AM in the morning on the 1st of January, 2024. It is a Monday, an incredible timing of coincidences that seems to be filled with an insane amount of symbolic power. I have not slept just yet after the party last night. Party, I say, but I think there bears much value in being clear in the words that I use when I so desire to do so, and party is certainly not a word I would use to describe last night. I spent the night at Komunitas Eden, the old religious community, some might say cult, that I was born and raised in until I was around 9. It’s been a few years going now that I’ve spent my new years here, after a long vacuum of the family not being invited. I find it extremely serene here. Truly like a slice of heaven right on earth. Not in the excessive luxury and greatness that some might attribute to heaven, but the more sublime, and, well, heavenly feeling, of everything around me. The sound of water flowing in the small fountain up front, a sweet scent of flowers, the red carpeted floor, the small wooden stool with a leather cushion my laptop is sat on, the soft large pillow I took from another room to rest my elbows on. The fact that everything around me was put there with intention and deep attention, creating a cohesive space that makes me feel at home. This feels good.

To be honest with you, I got compelled by something to write this post, but I don’t know what I want to convey with this particular post. I wanted to go to bed, or at least I should have gone to bed, as daybreak have reached and I ended the 2 AM craving meal discussion I had with a childhood friend about the situation around us, I walked around, browsed twitter a little, noticed how terrible it felt, noticed how nice the world around me felt, tweeted out how much worse everything else is compared to the now, and decide that I must write.

I’ve been thinking about where to go next after I finish uni. I’m definitely taking another semester because I can’t finish this by the next few days, and will take at least a week or two more before I could get something out, and by then I would be too late to finish by this semester. But that’s fine. I don’t feel much worry on that front anymore. I’ll just go and hang out with Fawwaz again for a week straight and I’ll be done. But what’s next? What comes after finishing this long arduous journey, especially when I find not just basically zero joy trying out for the jobs economic major get and I find that money doesn’t motivate me very much?

The first course of action is to survive, which means to earn a minimum amount of money each month to make sure I have a roof over my head and enough operational cost to function well enough to not just do the bare minimum. Hopefully a few pending projects come through, although I am also open for more traditional jobs* (as long as I’m working with someone who I know). My rough calculation shows that I need around $300-$500, an amount that I believe is extremely doable, even if I choose to do odd jobs here or there.

With that out of the way, I’m then free to actually choose what I want to do in life, and that part is much, much harder. Not by a bunch though because as I said, I’ve been thinking. I like thinking about this by imagining a time in five years time or so from now when someone ask me what I do.

New Friend: So what do you do?
Me: Me? I’m an artist that works on all sort of mediums
NF: Ooooh, what kind of things do you make?
Me: It’s all over the place from writing, community building, experience crafting, to projects that utilizes my weird plethora of disparate skills from web design to business canvases to game design to video editing to public speaking
NF: Huh. I see… If you don’t mind me asking, where do you work?
Me: Oh I’m a feral free agent. Sorta. I jump from project to project making things and helping friends out in their projects, but also I’ve had a few really generous patrons that are willing to fund months or years of my life that I basically don’t have to worry about not being able to live anymore.

Which honestly, even I find this scene to be insane and absurd. But. I don’t believe that said insane and absurd scene to be impossible to achieve. I can see the vision. A few branching paths that all leads there. Action to take if I want to build up toward that vision of myself.

Parts of me worries. It asks, “is it scalable? is it realistic? how do you justify people willing to be your patron? what will people say when you openly state your plans like this?”, and honestly, these question helped show me certain previously unexamined believes about the world that I have adopted into myself. An “unmanaged internalized Big Other” is my way of framing it, although I’m sure my philosophy friends would have other much richer descriptors of it. To answer those in order:

• Does it matter? Why do I need to make MY personal life plans scalable? What does it mean that anything I do require it to pass through the test of scalability? Even if it is true, how do you set the boundaries of what being scalable means? Scalable for what population? To what ends? All this is probably related to this feeling that I have to be a good example for the homeschooler community, that actions that I take will create ripples in the potential space of a lot of people, and that taking actions that only I can take due to certain things about myself (hoek privilege hoek) is actively making the world a worse place because I’m not aiming to create the largest impact.
• Does it matter? The dream, the vision, the idea, doesn’t necessarily have to be realistic to be useful. What we consider to be “realistic” also cannot fully map perfectly toward reality because the map is not the territory and I don’t have a good idea of what is possible in this massive complex world of ours. I think it’s realistic enough in the sense that I’m not imagining a future where I shoot laser beams out of my arms or to live in an ecosystem of gnomes and small forest critters that does complex machineries with water wheels, and even then I think I could see how the later could be made into reality.
• The model works. Youtubers have $5 patreons that supports them, Twitch streamers have donations that goes wild, Newsletter subscription is a thing that a lot of my friends have. Is it a guaranteed thing? Not really no. Is it in practice a possible thing? I think so. But really the question was to justify them being my patron, and to that I say… Idk LMAO. I honestly do not have a good gauge of what my real value is to others. This is the most “throwing it out to the universe and praying that something good comes up” part of the equation, and to that I say so be it. Let it be the dream!
• I had to talk to Visa to get his two cents about writing about money and budgets more detailed online because I know that money is a touchy subject for a lot of people, and I live in Indonesia, a country that while is large, does not have the highest of average wages, and I worry a bunch about the backlash that might occur if I openly talk about it. Everything else I’m okay with talking out loud though, since this is my own personal plans that is only affected by me alone, and is therefore useful to talk about so that people around me can plan and work accordingly. This is less of a true argument if I’m talking about things that require coordination though (nobuparty type of stuff), and I think out of the four questions is probably the only one that I think is still going to be worth asking at other times.

And so is this going to be the start of a recurring daily set of post? Idk. I’m going to continue doing reflections of the last five years though. Maybe write a little book or something about it. A continuation of my first book about my homeschooling journey, which you should totally buy if you live in Indonesia and speak Indonesian, if not then wait a few month I’ll probably release it in English on gumroad or something to add as some context for the new book. Or maybe not, this plan of translating my book into English have been going on for like three years now LMAO.