Long story short: where I come from, alcohol is a main social driver. Once I stopped drinking, people started asking why I stopped, and some even suggested that people who do not drink are somehow less trustworthy.

Then after a sports incident, I got a concussion. For a while I could not handle light, screens, noise, people, work, or normal social pressure. So I deliberately isolated myself until I could figure out how to get better.

Here's my checklist:

- Know why you're doing this and share with a close person; Someone else grounding you in your asocial trip can make a difference;

- Read books, Jung helped me stay sane while in isolation;

- Learn a new skill. I picked math and system programming as I realized it's easier for me to solve math problems and debug computers, rather than humans;

- Assume your state of mind is temporary and you're doing it with a purpose;

You're on your own, ignore the environment, find happiness inside your mind, don't seek too much external validation. Then your body will tell you if it's time to socialize or keep on deliberately introverting. Happy meditation.

Yeah, there are some Eastern EU countries where populist parties still milk the older voters with Soviet nostalgia. Yet, as usual, the same politicians who suggest how good things were back then are usually very happy to enjoy Western goods, freedom of movement, private property and EU funds.

But generally, people still remember the Soviet concentration camps, censorship, shortages of basic goods and the inborn corruption that came with the Soviet implementation of communism.

Communism ideologies seem to thrive among the young in (pseudo) democratic societies. That’s a paradox for me, as communism seems to exist because of the wealth distribution that capitalism creates.

Now, what the EU is doing right now with all that bureaucratic machine and the leftist social agenda, is another topic.

As someone coming from the Second world (Eastern Bloc), lived in the First world (Western Europe) and now living in the Third World (SEA Tropics), I'd say that in my opinion, a lot of the Westeners are so inherently arrogant that they don't even realize that. Some of these people would rather die from own arrogance, rather than imagining the other point of view.

Q.E.D. :)

As a PM in a startup, it took me a while to convince my boss I’m not a designer. It’s so easy nowadays to get a Figma file with an established design system and produce new features.

There are Figma plugins that let you extract a static HTML website into a Figma file. Copying that over Figma Make and prompting for a while can make pretty good prototypes that need very little adjustment back in Figma.

However, I believe that being able to do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Prompting back and forth can easily introduce a lot of cognitive load on top of all sorts of other daily task.

I feel the modern human in the loop is similar to the factory processing line workflow where just almost anyone can learn how to use a tool and produce output.

Over the last couple of years, I've spent a lot of time in Indonesia. By the time I got used to their way of communicating, I questioned my own reality, perception and sanity. I even put a thought it's some very passive way of gaslighting foreigners. It seems it's just how they like to do it here.