You Are Not a Tiger Mom

You are not a tiger mom. You’re probably not even Chinese. So why do you act like you are?

One part of you wants to watch TikTok, play League of Legends, drink boba tea, etc.

The other is paranoid about the economy and your employability. You need to learn to code. You need to do your math homework.

But you don’t actually want to do those things. Or if you do, you sap all the fun out of it with worry. You’ve got this voice that knows it’s best. It’s really upset that you waste your time on the internet. Maybe you even watch videos or read about why it’s bad to do that. You know that AI is coming so it’s probably not even worth learning to program. The tech industry is all backwards. Only uninspiring JavaScript-addled webapps get funding. Everything good has already been made.

Your tiger mom voice is still there, though. You can’t just veg out all day. You procrastinate. You do enough work to get by. You might find that this way of working actually yields good results, though. You receive some As in your classes, or your boss is satisfied. So you and your internal tiger mom keep fighting: you don’t really need to work hard, anyway. What about the future? What about when you need to make real money?

So you goad yourself into learning independently. You try to read textbooks and programming manuals chapter by chapter. You try to read the code bases of huge software projects, file by file. It’s incredibly dry. But this is what you need to do, you think. You wish you were Chinese.

This is really how I thought about my productivity for like two years. Curious if it resonates with the way that anyone has or currently thinks. I’m getting used to the idea of making software or reading just for fun, and trusting that the skills or knowledge that come out of it will be valuable, and not succumbing to FUD and infoglut.