from scratch

One of the slightly uncomfortable aspects of getting more experienced is you don’t get as many opportunities to start totally from scratch. I feel it a lot in my PhD… as you get deeper into a project, everything builds off what you’ve done previously, which means that previous mistakes, inaccuracies, and general messiness compounds. Many times, you reach the situation where you don’t even want to try and figure out how to fix these past mistakes… there’s a nagging fear that it may reveal a fundamental issue that invalidates a lot of your progress, and its almost easier at times to ignore it and plow forward. Other times, you just don’t have time to fix smaller stuff; projects always seem to accelerate.

Interestingly, I feel like this is one of the features that really makes it hard to enjoy the fruits of many years of work. When finishing up something that ought to be a culmination, I think many times it feels like you step away from something barely held together, a million cut corners disguised. Maybe there are projects that are done properly all the way through and those probably don’t feel like this, but I haven’t experienced this.

Instead, for me the real enjoyment comes not from finishing a project but from starting a new one fresh. My guess is that as I get deeper into stuff, I might not even get so many of these opportunities, starting something truly ‘new.’ At this point there’s so many pending projects that need finishing up that I’d imagine at some point you are just revisiting old stuff. But, at least for now, I am trying to be enjoy this brief moment where I finished recording my special, and get to start building new material pretty much from nothing. With this, probably makes sense to make a new website, so here’s that.