Moving forward

I haven't even began high school, but I just can't wait for retirement and when you get to just do whatever you want without needing to earn so much money to even not starve... but in the meantime someone pointed me to this speech:

https://paulgraham.com/hs.html

Of course the advice given in their is not realistic at least for me, because for me school extracurriculars and studying can already easily take 70+ hours a week.  Some of it I like, but some of it is probably going to be very tedious, but you never know.  I guess I'll have to wait and find out.

Now you may ask what do I do with my math plans??  This breaks my heart, but I'll just have to let it go more when it comes to grinding difficult problems and learn how to do things efficiently more.  It's pretty much the same in life as well because even after I retire, there's a certain amount of years before my brain cells just refuses to function and I get even less functional (this is already happening sometimes to me, although it's temporary and definitely not at the scale of older people.)

So somehow, I just need to get more energy... this is really a huge rat race because everything you do and have done in my life in the past 14 or so years will influence my energy right now.  It definitely isn't healthy to do so but even for things that happens years ago it's so easy to just leak your energy that way by dwelling on them.  And what I do now will continue to determine what type of person I am in the next 14 years of my life.  Of course I don't have to know, but sadly real world isn't Zootopia, you can't just Try Everything (tm) or you'll get burnt out... I feel weaker than that bunny in that film, somehow she knows she would be a police officer and still had the energy to overcome those challenges.  The thing is, energy != motivation and sometimes it's just so much guilt when the former doesn't match the latter...

(I've written more about the topic in https://johnzhou721.blogspot.com/2026/07/energy-management.html; the sad thing is that at that time I only realized even if you have all the time in the world you still can't get anything done on low energy, but only right now I think of the fact that I don't even have all the time in the world.  It feels like I'm destined to get nothing done after all, but why do I need to even do anything?  Because I enjoy it?  If I really enjoy something do I have to prove that I enjoy it?  If I enjoy it why can't I Just Do It (tm)?  The more I think about this the more paradoxical I get, and soon I realizes that I've spent more time thinking about this than actually working.........)

More random yapping

(My plans for after college: I may earn some free (see what I did here?) cash by way of some open-source contracts and GitHub sponsors earnings if I just develop hard enough.  More writing about programming coming later, source: trust me bro [sarcasm, given that I probably have no time].  And then I grab a pile of cash, go study many many years of classes in various colleges and actually see what all the other fields are about, then grab the rest of the cash, grab a cabin in the woods, move out, and cut contact with everyone except a select few people that I'll be close friends with at that point.)