New Year, New Questions, New Opportunities

Here's to a surprising 2024

Image created with DALL-E 3 by myself

As I started cleaning my flat to kick off 2024 on a good note, I fell upon a note I wrote a while back.

夢が夢で終わらないように (“So your dreams don’t end up being just dreams”)

This comes from a 24-year-old song that happens to be the ending song for one of my favorite animes: Hajime no Ippo.¹ When I saw it, I had a sudden realization that didn’t feel so great.

I’m not sure what my dream is anymore.

But as the beginning of the year is upon us now, I reckon if there’s any time to start doing something about it, it’s now.

You see, looking back at the past 9 years², I’ve noticed a trend. While I rarely hold on to my new resolutions, the quality of my January either sets me up for a good year or down for a bad one.

The start of 2023 was completely messy as I was preparing for my departure to South Korea and was worried I wouldn’t get my visa on time for my flight. I tried to do everything at once and ended up doing nothing.

Most crucially, it got me into the habit of taking way too long breaks in the middle of the day and therefore making work spill over evenings and weekends. In turn, since I didn’t rest/enjoy my weekends as much, I wanted to rest during weekdays and therefore kept my long lunch breaks³. A proper vicious circle.

I knew it was wrong but I also didn’t realize how much this impacted my life as a whole. The problem, I reckon, truly came from a lack of knowing exactly where my time went.

In short, no tracking = no solving

If you’ve followed me for some time, you probably know I spend too much time on pointless YouTube videos and video games.⁴ I’ve now decided to log these times into Toggl so I know at what time of the day and for how long I do them. Having to enter them also makes me more aware that I’m doing it.

Just this morning, I began watching a video and realized I hadn’t started the timer. I opened Toggl and ended up stopping the video right there.

I’m not the only one turning back to logging things since

Joel Neff

mentioned doing the same in his New Year piece. I guess seeing

Victoria

’s language study logs tracking well everything throughout the year also helped.

Anyway. Back to the dream thing.

Falling upon that small piece of paper, I hung it again as a reminder not to follow my dream but to find it again. I know the goals I set a few years ago are not in line with who I am, what I do, and what I want to do anymore.

For once, I don’t feel the same urge to learn new languages anymore. Instead, I want to enjoy using the ones I know with more ease. For Korean, this means reading more. For Mandarin, this means speaking more. English and Japanese are just part of my life so no stress there. Spanish is on the back burner until the next time I’ll need it. I’ve already talked about this last time so I won’t bore you again.

The only “exception” is braille. I’ll talk about learning it more in two weeks but anyway, braille isn’t a language per se—rather a writing system.

This means learning languages is taking a backseat compared to the rest of my life. Language learning as a whole is still a passion though so I’m still going to read and write about it. Just maybe not as much.

2024 also is the year I’m going back to France. Most likely for a long time.⁵

It’ll be a year of many experiments for me. Whether in my professional or personal life, I plan on getting out of my comfort zone more than I’ve done before.

So, what are the questions I’ll be working through this year? Here are just a few:

• What’s my “dream”? In the sense of what am I working towards and why?

• What’s fulfilling me and how can I do more of that?

• What’s draining me and how can I do less of that?

• What am I pushing away because of worries/fear and how can I rid myself of them?

Rereading all this makes me realize this sounds a bit negative but there’s a reason for me using the word “opportunities” in the title. All this reflection won’t be easy but it’s for the best.

I also know I have no idea how 2024 will turn out. 2023 was full of surprises. Both good and bad ones. So was 2022. So were the years before. I don’t see why 2024 wouldn’t be similar.

I’m looking forward to this year’s surprises and opportunities.

So, yeah, I wish you a Happy New Year again and hope you’re as psyched as I am about the mess 2024 will most likely be. 😊

1. It’s also an anime that impacted me drastically when I first saw it but that’s a story for another day.

2. ie. since ever since I started working

3. Some lasted 5-6 hours, which I reckon made them not count as “lunch break” anymore but well.

4. If you didn’t know, here’s an unfortunate recent example from December. I spent one of my last weekends in Korea (since I’m leaving at the end of January) playing Hollow Knights for 19 hours. If that’s not overkill, I don’t know what is.

5. There’s talk of a Freelance visa in Japan though so I’m not closing that door entirely but it’s still quite unlikely.