My failures of 2020

You can choose to remember all the evil that the universe caused for human beings on Earth in 2020, or you can go beyond.

Last year my post was optimistic: I had learned a lot of things, and I was ready to use all the lessons learned to make 2020 a great year of recovery, of spotlight.

And for goodness sake: looking at my spreadsheet with 2020 goals, I must say that I did excellently, greatly improving my personal position, my financial stability and building all the bricks of my future: next year I will graduate (if all goes well), I will marry (if another lockdown doesn’t prevent us) and I will move inside Rome with my future wife.

But this is not an optimistic post about the future. This is a negative post about absolute evil. I decided to do it this way, because it is useless to think about the good if you don’t know the evil. Only by knowing evil, pain and despair can you truly appreciate the good in its purest form - when it arrives.

Last year I learned to travel, this year I learned to stand still. Last year I didn’t have a stable job prospect (not permanent, that never, but by life choice), this year I feel like a journalist and a content and community professional.

This year I learned to know pain. In all its forms: when I stayed at home for 3 months without seeing my future wife, when I read all the DPCMs (Prime Ministerial Decrees) to understand what I could and could not do.

I watched much fewer TV series than last year and so I found much more time to study, and in fact I passed 4 exams out of 5, but I spent more than 200 hours playing and studying the DPCMs to feel calmer. And instead I got even more depressed.

I passed only 4 exams out of 5, when my goal was 5 and therefore to graduate. I wanted to read 15 books, and instead I read only 12, of which 5 graphic novels. I played a lot to vent my loneliness in many moments, and to feel omnipotent at least in a fantasy world, since in reality I had the same power as a stone on the bottom of the sea: still, waiting for someone to move it from above.

I wanted to write this post on December 31st, and talk about the optimism that 2021 would bring us. And instead it makes no sense, and next year will be a big question mark.

Every year, since 2017, I measure the great goals of my life. For the next one, I have no idea what to put. I haven’t the faintest idea of ​​what will happen.

I am sure that my goals will change a lot between the first and second half of the year, that yes. But I can’t, as I did in 2019, predict the effort I will be able to put into doing this or that. In 2020 I wanted to run a lot, and in fact I started well. I also did a lot of activity, and then everything went to hell. Now I study and work, and I don’t move to limit movements to the maximum, going only to visit my fiancée, and this makes me feel terrible. I would like to run, I would like to ride a bike, I would like to do it when I want and I would like to stop working in smart working for a while, because it means working much more, and I want a break from all this.

To tell the truth, I think that in 2021 I will work decidedly less than 2020. But mainly because in 2020 I worked like never happened to me since I work: a lot, relentlessly. It will be very difficult for me to repeat the same numbers. RescueTime tells me that I was 4100 hours at the PC or phone, an increase of about 70% compared to 2019. I was also productive (and I perceived it), but the increase in productivity (measured as hours spent carrying out activities that brought value to my goals) only led to monotony.

For me, who made over 400 trips between 2017 and 2019, waking up every morning in the same bed and always doing the same things (breakfast, get dressed, sit at the desk, work until 1 PM, have lunch, relax 30 minutes, resume until 6 PM, relax) was destructive. Really, I feel just drained and apathetic, if I think about how I was before. I had some beautiful moments, very beautiful (when I asked my fiancée to marry me above all), I forced my creative abilities to produce articles and research on La Stampa that stimulated me a lot and made me meet many new people and ideas, but I can define them only, as Schopenhauer would say, as the path of the pendulum of life, which oscillates between pain and boredom. Moments that are destined to be overwritten quickly by new situations of discomfort.

I don’t know if this thought of mine is the result of the fact that I am growing up and getting to know the world more and more for what it is, but I feel increasingly gloomy and less naive. When I started with Tweaknology in 2014, I did nothing but praise innovation and be optimistic about the future, and flaunt my successes (yes, I did it). I realize that that was the perfect path to become an influencer, with all the followers commenting with compliments, congratulations and celebrations for the successes achieved. And instead for a couple of years now, perhaps precisely from the moment I left the company I had founded, I do nothing but celebrate my failures, and flaunt how incapable I am of achieving certain goals.

For goodness sake, I manage to do something good too. But I believe that the reason why I fail so much is that I always set myself big, unrealistic and unachievable goals for the means I have available. What comes out is that I achieve acceptable results, which are perceived as excellent by the outside world.

But what am I doing in the world, if I don’t try to do impossible things? If I don’t continuously try to overcome limits, to always leave my comfort zone, which thus becomes bigger and bigger? I am not capable of doing anything else. And that’s what I will do in 2021, without too many frills: I will amplify my comfort zone even more, and the goals will always be the same. This year my comfort zone has increased a lot, but I remained where I was. I saw the boundaries I can cross, but I couldn’t do anything to go beyond. Next year I could try to cross them, if restrictions on personal freedom are lifted.

here, it is useless to tell ourselves that everything will be fine. Nothing will be fine at all. And this is how we must think, to be able to survive 2021. In the last 12 months we thought that everything would be fine, but the numbers instead tell us that the pandemic has only worsened. And it will probably get worse again, despite the vaccines. Because, anyway, it takes years to vaccinate the entire population, not days nor even months. So, why hope that everything will be fine when, at least for the short term, it won’t be so?

It is obvious that all these reasonings are suitable for the vast majority of people who, like me, do not have the ability to think and conceive the future beyond a time frame of 12 months. Practically all millennials, at least. If there is someone who manages to say ‘everything will be fine’ and convey this concept implying that it will happen in a year or more, welcome, I am ready to listen. But for the rest, abandon all hope, ye who enter (in 2021): it will be even worse than this year, and thinking like this is the only method I can conceive to face and survive the future.

My image with goals doesn’t change much, but acquires a white background and has a rainbow shape: I want to hope that the goals of 2021 lead me to be more optimistic for 2022, remind me that I have achieved many milestones, and that the progress of 2019 has not been wasted: it is only a pause, and then we will return stronger than before. I want to get excited for every good thing that will happen in 2021, because it will be unexpected and unforeseen. And I can do it, well, only if I have no expectation whatsoever.

Happy (?) 2021, folks.

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