Posts / Missing it ⏰

Overthinking (as always) about how I might be missing the life I could be living.

Written by Zaid Mukaddam

Jul 24, 2024

In the past 6 months, I've been having recurrent thoughts about how we only get one chance of living in this world. That we must do everything we possibly can and enjoy the most out of it. Every once in a while, I feel like my mind won't stop remembering that I’m already 21, going to be 22 next month and I'm not getting any younger. This makes me anxious as hell, not because I think that I have little time left, but because I might be wasting these years not living the life I could.

I’ve heard lots of people saying stuff like “Everybody has 2 lives, the second starts when you realize you only have one”. I think that this is supposed to illustrate the idea of how one starts to live the life he/she is “supposed/want” to be living when death enters the room. I kind of agree with this and think that most people can turn this saying into a reality. I might be wrong, but I think that the most common result of this realization is to start giving more importance to your time and special moments.

The problem is: I can't.

For me, at least, it's really hard to not become anxious when this thought of death crosses my mind. I get the feeling that I need to do every single thing I possibly can and that my life should be way more amazing, otherwise, I might be missing it. The problem is that my life is not that amazing and it's impossible to do everything I want. Feels like I’m running on an infinite treadmill chasing living up to what I consider to be the ideal life eternally. Another thought that makes me anxious is that, for me, there is a right age for doing some things, and feeling that I might be losing these opportunities only makes it worse.

I’ve overanalyzed my present a lot and I only have 2 options:

The hard part is to manage this bad feeling of missing stuff I could’ve been living. But, in the end, I think that it's right. Maybe I just need more therapy to accept that the years will go through one way or the other.

Cool stuff I've come across

I found out about this Awesome AI app that has a beautiful UI and is amazingly simple to use. It creates amazing SwiftUI components like an complete app interface! Kudos to the developers!

OpenAI just launched GPT-4o mini fine tuning. GPT-4o mini offers four times the training context (64k tokens) and eight times the inference context (128k tokens) compared to GPT-3.5 Turbo. Get started for free with up to 2 million training tokens per day until September 23!

Read the Llama 3.1 paper to learn about the latest advancements in large language models. The Llama3.1 model is a dense Transformer with 405 billion parameters and a context window of up to 128,000 tokens, supporting multilinguality, coding, reasoning, and tool usage. It is designed to deliver quality comparable to leading models like GPT-4 across various tasks.