Ups and downs and ups

A personal manifest for climbing the Maslow pyramid through falls

It’s been a long time since I wrote a personal post. The last time I did dates back to probably 2015, my very first post on Medium.

Most other things that I’ve shared online have focused on my ideas rather than my character and emotions and self. Even on my Facebook and Instagram and Twitter I’m more of an education idealist and intellectual rather than my personal self. Probably because my personal self is an introvert, while my extroverted half preaches idealism and pursuit of scalable positive change in the world.

For as long as I remember, I’ve had these 2 halves, with the emotional half always silently watching the talkative and opinionated me. That blog post that I mentioned in the first paragraph…it’s a story of these same 2 sides throughout my childhood and teenage life and how I got to merge them in 2015.

Then from 2015 to 2019 I went on a rewarding journey that led me to become my curiosities, as my curiosities turned into my passion and eventually purpose, and it was very fulfilling.

More on that fulfilment, recently I learned the science behind it as I discovered the flow state through a Mindvalley University talk.

Flow state is a state in which we’re in flow with our most potent intrinsic motivations. In this state, brain produces a giant cascade of neurochemistry. You get norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, serotonin and endorphins which are all performance enhancing neurochemicals.

To put things in perspective, romance — which is a very powerful emotional experience– gives you only 2 of those neurochemicals, whereas flow gives you all 5. And it doesn’t stop there. These neurochemicals are addictive, too.

In other words, I wasn’t just fulfilled, I was addicted. I was addicted to playing in my curiosities, passion and purpose day and night. I’d built a platform that had allowed me to self actualise sustainably and consistently with ever growing feedback/validation, and a fantastic skills/challenge ratio that made me better, too. I was in the zone for over 3 years. That was a period in which I co-founded Malaysia’s top tech education student club, worked full time at a deep tech AI startup, gave a TEDx talk, spoke at the International Association of Universities, co-authored an Oxford University Press book, built several high performing teams of students who created lasting large scale events and experiences and coached even more students and all of these while being a full time computer science undergrad.

Until last year in 2019, that platform, that window of drive started to close down for me as I approached the end of my university life, and I knew that unless I found a way to extend it sustainably or find one that’d let me stay on that track and resume my growth and flow, I was gonna have to pause pursuing what seemingly mattered to me the most, until I could afford to resume it again. If you, too, lived a deep meaningful university life, you can relate to this feeling. It’s not the fear of growing up, but the fear that you may stop growing the way you wish to grow.

It also felt as if I was going from a state of self-actualisation down to the esteem level in the Maslow pyramid of needs. For a few weeks and months I thought that sucked, until it got worse when I learned that my dad was having serious visa issues that could translate to business challenges, money issues and possibly consequently very severe family struggles.

What do you do when your daily concerns change from career, love and relationship to extreme family financial issues and potentially worse? My attention started drifting.

My immediate reactions included fear, feeling victimised, getting less expressive and gradually losing gratitude and faith. All terrible, terrible reactions, yet predictable ones. I’m not mad at myself, although I like to think I would never react that way again, or at least I aspire not to. I was 24, and as seemingly developed as I may have been for a 24 year old, I had experienced more wins than losses, and I’d done things alone more than I had in a team.

Only recently I learned that the human brain has a tendency to quickly normalise positive or negative experiences. In other words, it acts to get used to things fast, and one conclusion of that is to say that our brain doesn’t by default stay thankful for good things. If anything, it does the opposite, and unless we put an active effort into staying grateful, we’re on a biological mission to take people and things for granted.

(For the nerds, the scientific term is “hedonic adaptation”)

My point is, if our brain is on a mission to take things for granted, then a life with more wins than losses without an active and frequent gratitude practice is a recipe for irrational decision making that assumes you have nothing to lose, at times where you may have 99 things to lose and only 1 problem to fix. I learned that lesson the hard damn way as I gave away or lost the beautiful 99 things in my life to solve that 1 problem. That included my job at the time and a deep connection with a girl that I liked. Could I do it without that loss? I will never know. In the moment, I felt I was saving them from own problems.

Later in August 2019, my dad’s businesses died when the lower middle class population’s purchasing power dropped drastically over the Summer, and throughout some unpleasant debt management process, we both went broke and eventually homeless. He continued living in our shop for some months while I crashed at my friend and ex-manager’s place for a month, and then at another friend and ex classmate’s room back in my university campus. Few of my friends knew about this and it took me several months before I could find peace with this and talk about it to more friends.

What started with me going one step down from a state of self-actualisation, had now suddenly turned into going all the way down.

We’re good now, we’ve been good since January this year and in February, a few weeks after my 25th birthday I went on a think-week vacation to reflect, heal and recalibrate. I’m much more comfortable and confident about the future than any other time in my life, and I’m practicing to be grateful for every bit of positivity in my life and my friends and family’s life.

In the spirit of gratitude, the best thing that could’ve possibly happened to me at that low point did happen and one night I accidentally came across a Mindvalley job opening, which I applied and eventually got an offer for. Between a data product manager at Air Asia and a learning product manager at Mindvalley, I picked the job that’d let me financially help my family and help me get back on my feet redefine my character, become a beginner again and develop skills that I care about and reconnect with the friends and faith and gratitude that I failed to keep along the way.

Hedonic adaptation is a double edge sword that means that your brain tends to adapt to both negative and positive experiences quickly so that you don’t particularly feel happy/grateful for the good things or scared of the horrific things anymore, and I’m writing this so I can read it every morning and remember there’s a fucking pyramid to climb, and that the hard thing about the pyramid isn’t the climb but the fall, and the faith, and the love, and the friends who are there for you when even you’re not there for you, and the ferocity to look fear in the face and say:

“I have lived through this horror, I can take the next thing that comes along. I must do the thing I think I cannot do.”

Yours,
Sina