notes.xdavidhu.me

How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Music and smells are two of the most effective ways to re-experience the emotions of a specific time in the past. Listening to a song from a particular time of my life brings me back to how I felt at that point in ways photos can’t. Sometimes I can even recall exact visuals of what I was doing or where I was walking when listening.

Over the last 10 years, I followed a system that allows me to re-experience any specific time of any year.

Every January 1st, from desktop/web, I:

Create a new playlist. Title it the past year.
Copy all of my liked songs and paste them into the new playlist. This will maintain the order.
Empty my liked songs.
Save an out-of-bounds backup of the new playlist, in case my Spotify account messes up in the future. I select all & paste it into a sheet in Google Drive.
Start listening to new music, like them over the year.

Since the archive saves the order of likes, it grants more granular access than just years. For example, if I want to re-experience how the fall of 2016 felt, I open the corresponding year’s list, scroll 1/4 down from the top, and start listening.

During the year, when I listen to my liked songs, I usually start from the top of the stack, without shuffle. This is natural for me, since the newly saved songs are the ones I like the most at a given time. This causes me to listen to a “rolling window” of my liked songs as time passes, linking specific music to specific dates.

In addition to saving songs that I find myself and particularly like, I like to save songs that are playing around me, on the radio, or at places I visit, and somehow stand out. Even if I might not fully like them at first, I find that they serve as great anchor points, and they usually grow on me after a few listens.

To maintain the integrity & not override the memories associated with specific songs, I rarely listen to or re-save songs from the past years. Sometimes I give myself exceptions, though, especially with remixes. ;)

See my last 10 years: https://open.spotify.com/user/xdavidhu

Without a goal, I am cooked

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I used to have goals. I used to have strong motivations. These were the things that kept me going and anything that didn’t align with them, I had extreme difficulty getting myself to do. This is why I performed so poorly in high school, and this is why I dropped out of university. I simply could not do stuff for the sake of it. While at first sight, this could look like irresponsible & self-centered behavior, I do value this in myself a lot, since it never allows me to settle. It basically makes it impossible for me to do something I don’t find meaning in.

In the last few years, something shifted. I feel I’m losing this. It is fair to say, that at this point, I don’t have any goals and I am not particularly motivated. I don’t know where I am going, and I am a little bit ashamed of it. Maybe this is because I feel like “I made it”. What I have now in terms of career was all I dreamed about - working at one of the biggest tech companies, going behind the curtain, uncovering the mysteries I was always fascinated by as a child. (I was really a fan. I watched The Internship so many times - this is me recreating the Golden Gate Bridge shot during my first time in the US.)

But what now? Previously, the next step was always so clear. But I guess I grew up. Do I keep working at the same place for the next decade, become an expert in a specific area, and get promoted many times? I don’t know if that is for me. I need a finish line to train & go for.

I want to create, instead of maintain. Solve something really really hard, instead of maintaining a solution to a really really hard problem that someone solved before me. I want the challenge of doing and creating something impossible. And once done, move on to create the next thing.

What role is that? Or should I just get a life lol?

Compensated

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I want to create so much value, that what I get back, even if its much smaller, will always be more than enough. And both circles will keep growing overtime.

Btw I like to believe this even works in a selfish way 😉

Burnout

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

i like to have a possibly highly silly approach to burnout.

Think of it like being an athlete. Where you are constantly training to get better. Similar to how you would keep running further and further, day after day, until at one point you can, you know, run a marathon without stopping or something.

Would it be fun? Would it be easy? Well, probably not, but that’s all fine. This is still just training. I’ll have fun and work with ease later on, once I get really good. But I am not there yet. Not at all. — And paradoxically, this approach is what makes the process fun, and motivating. The potential, I guess.

When things get difficult, I’d prefer to keep going. Maybe push it even further. So that instead of burning out, the original problems would get so small & easy that they wouldn’t even get to me at all. Hence, I wouldn’t burn out! (And I could reset my baseline - so everything I achieved so far would now be just nothing. Exciting! It actually really is.)

Or maybe this is the fast-track to losing all sense of meaning and motivation by age 25. But even if it is… I guess I say, bring it on, man.

So lonely, it physically hurts

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

And that’s not clickbait at all, the closest I can compare it to is being punched in the gut repeatedly every minute or so.

My life in London is kind of a constant state of the above, separated by work, which distracts me enough during the daytime (or perhaps invokes other, stronger anxieties), however leaving with a strong hangover of going back home in the evening.

It feels like running at 20% capacity, sometimes getting to the point where I can barely get myself to do chores & day to day stuff. Or prepare food. Not to mention cleaning, which usually ends up postponed until the day before someone comes to visit me. Postponed out of feeling powerless. All I can do is lie on my bed and search for the next distraction.

I’m reasonably good at maintaining professional relationships with people, but anything deeper, they will have to initiate.

The longer it goes on, the more I end up thinking that nobody else is lonely besides me. That what I feel my needs are, are weird, and different. Other people are all good with being alone. They are satisfied with only surface-level, professional connections. They don’t want someone to cuddle with in the evening.

On the rare occasions I get to be intimate with someone, I realize that fuck no, there is more depth to people, and we all want to feel loved. I mean, of course.

Constantly being punched in the gut leaves me falling into meaninglessness, leaving all my actions to be motivated either by the urge for distraction, or by my sense of excessive responsibility at work. Nothing around I want to do, or what I am excited about remains. Just the autopilot.

It is like a void into which you fall deeper and deeper, and the harder it becomes to get out of it. The less and less I feel like initiating.

I want to be going after something. I want to play the game. I see where I want to be, but I just can’t make myself get there. It’s very hard to do anything in this state. It’s like starving. Or like pressing the gas pedal while the car is in neutral.

And once deep in the void, it’s very easy to feel that this is really what I deserve. And no one wants to be with me.

Impact

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t care about your university degree. I don’t care about your certificates. Better yet, I don’t even care about your technical skills, or how much money you’ve made. They are all just tools, a means to an end.

What I am interested in is what impact you had on the world so far. And what impact you are planning to have on it.

I don't want to be not unwell

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

First of all, I find “unwell” such a great word. It’s clear, elegant, but straight to the point. It’s professional.

I don’t want to live on “easy mode”. I want the challenge – because if I can’t handle this, how will I handle the even harder challenges of the future? It means suffering alone when I could potentially be with someone who cares, or just buying the cheapest food when I could afford to have a nice meal. I want to be resilient. I don’t want to be spoiled. I don’t want to have it easy. That is not who I am. That is not what my values are. Being unwell made me who I am today. I don’t want to lose that.

If I can handle the toughest conditions, and be OK while doing it, imagine what it would be like at the best. I’m chasing the feeling of having 64 baked potatoes in your inventory and an automated farm at home. You know you’ll be fine.

“Imagine what it would be like in the best.”

Well, there is a catch. At what point will it be OK to allow myself to not challenge myself constantly? To let go? To “rest”? Before I get there, having it nice, or having it easy would not be too nice at all. Because I’d feel that’s not who I am.

Honestly, I like the idea of never stepping off the challenge. I want to build a gigantic potato farm. I want to have large chests full of stacks of baked potatoes. Maybe once I have that, I’ll feel OK about eating 10 of them.

Nightmare

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I just woke up from a very disturbing dream.

I’m in high school, in sports class. We have to do pull-ups and are being graded on how many we can do. Just a regular, yearly test. I performed really well while practicing, so I’m confident that I’ll do well. We are standing next to each other in a straight line, with the teacher in front of us. My name is called first, and I walk out.

Cut. I don’t remember anything after this. I recall some feelings of anxiety and pressure. This is weird and a little bit concerning, I think to myself. But it doesn’t feel like too big of a deal. I go on with the other classes of the day and don’t think much of what just happened.

It’s the next day. To my horror, I see a video of myself in the class group chat from yesterday’s PE class. The video shows me succeeding in the first pull-up, but struggling with the second one, and ultimately failing. After this, the video shows me suddenly turning into something I am really terrified to see. I start going crazy in the classroom. My eyes turn into something dark and aggressive. I start angrily pulling shelfs off the wall, smashing tables, and making a mess. My classmates freeze up in fear. I’m shouting, and I’m aggressive with everyone who tries to stand in my way. The video ends with the teacher and a couple of my classmates tying me up to a chair with a zip tie to contain the situation, all of them frightened by what just happened.

I’m terrified that I don’t remember any of this. I feel ashamed and deeply concerned. As I’m about to send a long message into the group chat with a mix of apology & an explanation of my honest and scary clueless about what has happened, and how, I realize that I’m actually in a class right now, sitting in the back of the room, on my phone. I feel disoriented. I excuse myself to the bathroom. When I get back, I notice I’m in a hospital robe. How did that get on me? The teacher and a few of my classmates come up to me and discreetly whisper to me that the way I’m behaving is really not OK. They tell me that I am two-faced, I play the nice guy, but in reality, I’m an aggressive, dangerous asshole with them. I don’t know what to say. I’m perplexed and overflowing with anxiety, the feeling reaching down to my core.

I just feel even more terrified now. I was just about to get over what happened yesterday at sports class, and trying to rectify it somehow with the people I scared, yet, people are telling me again that I’m aggressive, and I’m behaving in a scary and very concerning way. What could have I done this time? I can only remember going to the bathroom. What happened after that? I can’t recall anything. And now, people tell me that I’ve snapped again, and once again, I became aggressive and dangerous. I lost control.

I can’t trust myself. I am a dangerous person, a monster, who could hurt others any time without remembering what I’ve done. I am afraid of myself. I have to constantly monitor myself to make sure that I never lose control again.

This dream highlighted one of my deepest fears which to this day, manifests itself in everything I do. It brought to light a feeling of fear that I hadn’t felt so intensely in a while. A fear of losing control and hurting the people around me. A fear that I have to be in constant control, otherwise something will go terribly wrong.

I had a person close to me who I witnessed losing control. People got hurt. Both emotionally, and sometimes physically. I was one of them, too.

To be liked by all

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Like gradient descent, (which for the math people I have to point out I do not know much about) I carefully test and fine-tune who I am to find the optimal local minima of behavior that would result in the most liked and positive reaction in a given social context.

And I think I am very good at it. I can even do it with people I haven’t seen in years. I just pull their old model from some cold storage I wasn’t even aware existed and continue the behavior I optimized for them years ago in high school. And if it doesn’t work, I just re-adjust.

This already requires immense effort, but it gets even more complicated as more people get into the picture. At one point, the best behavior for one person will result in someone else getting hurt. It doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does, I don’t have a solution for it. I just freeze up.

All of this, so compute-heavy, drains me in no time. Even more importantly, it makes me feel like, for lack of a better word, a constantly fake smiling class clown. I know my fake smile when I see it. Or rather when I feel like doing it. But when it’s happening, it doesn’t feel like there is a way out of it.

Why I am doing it? I want to be liked of course. Or rather I am terrified of being disliked. Being disliked would feel like hurtful proof of a core hypothesis of mine – that I’m an undesirable person.

– Optimising for Authenticity.

Originally, I wanted to put this as the title. This sounds like an exciting new value to follow. It feels like the logical next step. It feels freeing. Yet, the concept of people liking me, better yet loving me for who I am, to some extent, still feels foreign to me.

What is authenticity even? Many times in the midst of being with others, I am filled with anxiety strong enough that I can’t even access what is authentic anymore. I don’t know who I am anymore. You could ask me what I want do to, and I’d just blank. I want you to like me, but that’s understandably not something I’d want to portray externally too much.

Recently I have realized that in these situations, what I really want is to get out of the cloud of anxiety and feel calm again. From there on, things will be much clearer. I try to approach it now from a physical angle, since I don’t think I can think myself out of that pressure, no matter how hard I try. Breathing exercises seem to help now. They act on a lower level than my thinking ever could. But this is a sidetrack.

I also think I’d be too hurtful and offensive being my authentic self. I dismiss a lot of my thoughts and feelings as things that do not fit my values. Maybe being myself would not require acting out everything, nobody does that anyway. But maybe people would accept more than I think is possible. Maybe it wouldn’t be as big of a disaster as I imagine it to be. After all, I never really tried it out.

Maybe it is the perfect way to be polarising. I don’t have to be a match with everyone I ever meet. In reality, it is likely going to be very few people who will be a good match. Maybe if I go in with the expectation that we are only going to get along with 1 person out of every 100 people I meet, I will not feel so pressured, and I will not be disappointed. Maybe I could feel more free to act without optimizing too much. Whatever that means in reality.

Can't have you

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:01 +0000

I’m at home, feeling alone. I waiting for you to message me. It’s ridiculous. This lonely anxiety is ridiculous too, but it grasps me so strongly, that I can’t feel anything else. But I am still waiting for your message. If my phone vibrates, I am hoping that it is from you.

You only do what you want to do. You are emotional. You are real. You rejected me. And I still crave your love. You don’t do things to please others. Or if you do, it’s really obvious if you don’t like it. And you don’t love me. I know if you would ever love me, it would be real. It would be uncontrollable. Emotional. Obsessive. You couldn’t stop yourself, just as you can’t fake liking me.

I want you to fall in love with me so badly. Be crazy with me. Obsess about me. Hate me. Have any kind of passion for me, love or hate, I don’t care. As soon as I am starting to move on, you show up and show me a little bit of love. You are so adorable when you feel good. And when you talk to me excited, I know you are honest. When you show me a tiny bit of your love, I know it’s real. And that feels amazing.

You don’t like to be around people. I crave to be. If you would crave to be with me, that would mean the world to me. Because that would be real. I want to send you this song that you showed me. But I messaged you first too many times today. It’s embarrassing the way I need your love.

Most nights I feel waves of sadness. A grief of knowing that you will never love me the way I need you. You are in love with someone else who doesn’t love you back. Isn’t it funny? I crave your love because you don’t love me back, while you do the same but with somebody else.

Both of us are looking for something we can’t have. Neither you nor I would settle for something that is right there. And I am right here for you.

I want you to be so in love that you act insane.

I am looking at our pictures. It seems so unreal, so beautiful. You look adorable. I am so grateful. I am crying in the middle of my dark room. These emotions are beautiful. They are so sad. I am so grateful to feel them.

I am writing this so that one day you read this and think back to me, and to when we were together. And you would see how big of an impact you had on me, and you would feel the same emotions I am feeling. And you would love me. I am crying writing this. You are important to me. I want to be important to you. I want you to cry when you are reading this. These are so intensively beautiful and sad emotions. I want to show them to you.