Commitment

My name is Alex. I've told you this once already, but that was almost 2 months ago as of writing this post. Hopefully you still remember me.

The idea for this blog post came to me just as I wrapped up studying my Japanese vocabulary at 2:30AM on Friday, July 31st, 2026. I looked at the clock, my completed Anki deck, and finally my stats. They're quite sad. The last time I'd held a streak longer than 3 days was 11 months ago. I put down Japanese almost as quickly as I'd picked it up. It's one of the shittier things about me. The hobbies, activities, and experiments I start in my life get memory-holed as quickly as they spawn.

This has happened with almost everything that I've ever touched, as far back as I can remember. To give some examples: this blog, drawing, running, mountain biking, Olympic weightlifting (a story for another day), hobby electronics, weight loss... The list goes on and on. All that to say, throughout my life, I've struggled with commitment issues. I assume many other people also struggle with the same issue, but to be honest I can't be bothered to research the psychology of how habits, hobbies, or giving up really work. Shit, I almost gave up on this blog. It has literally been 8 weeks.

You might see the above as some sort of screaming into the void about my problems, but that's where I surprised myself tonight. As I wrote down the initial idea, I decided to take my apparent inaction as inspiration to slowly begin changing that. The fact that this post is being written is proof enough that I can, in theory, break out of this cycle and actually do something about it. Luckily, there is some precedent that I am able to commit to these sorts of things that make me a better person.

Namely: my relationship, the 4 years of work I've done at The Startup (tm), programming in general, and badminton. To theorycraft a bit, I used to play badminton as a kid and only picked it up again recently. I also learned to program at quite a young age and stopped for a while (5ish years) before getting to the point I'm at today. In contrast, my relationship has been rock solid. I'm pretty sure that a relationship isn't something I'd want to be on-off, which means I'm at least doing one thing right. I can't say for certain until Future Alex takes over, but I'll write it down here: restarting (my hobbies) is a failure mode that I don't know if I should be proud or ashamed of.

Either way, I'm still on my journey to master myself, and at this point I'm as clueless as the rest of you as to why these things stuck with me. It could be subconscious, social, or any number of things. Even if my life were a lab, a study like this might take years to return results. So this blog post exists as a note to Future Alex. Today Alex hopes that this is not just another experiment that dies out on its own, and Today Alex hopes that Future Alex looks back on this note, grinning stupidly, while he writes the follow-up.

Thank you all for reading.