Hello all organic and artifical life forms,

I want to make quick updates on what I have done in the last 2 months. 2 months full of attempts and failures. These 2 months felt like two years for me. I don’t know where can I start. Before diving through my thoughts I have to warn you that I won’t talk about awesome projects or essays, I will talk about my personal learning adventure. So if you have limited time, don’t waste your time here.

I started this semester, thinking that I would have to put some extra effort into learning everything I wanted to learn. Because there is a lot I want to learn and I am responsible for planning my time. I can fit anything I want to fit into my day. One of my dreams was to be stay at home without interrupted by obligatory social gatherings and learn through all month. This was the thing that I want it all the time, so I had to push my boundaries ’till the end. It seems my boundaries aren’t as far away as I thought.

I made wonderful plans to do all the things that I want to do. I was planning to learn my classes effectively and read textbooks to strengthen my fundamental knowledge, read wonderful sociological essays and books, take a lot of programing courses from Coursera, code all the projects that I want to code and get better at playing ukulele.

Then my *dear* school’s plans came and turned all my plans upside down. To summarize briefly, we take our modules in half the time that it normally takes. This made learning extremely inefficient and took all the time I was planning to spend doing other things. We took our classes such a compressed way. The other negative thing is that we take two exams from these modules. One of them is now and online, other one will be four months later face to face. We try to suggest other methods for taking these modules and no one listens to us.

I hate not being seen as an individual. I hate it. I have my own life besides this university. I’m not just a student, I have other passions to follow but they’re thinking like that I have to devote all my time to the university just because I’m student. Where I go to university, or what I’m studying or what grades I get don’t define me, but this education system tries to make us feel that way. And it is very successful in this. To get A’s and perfect scores I only focus on my classes and my other plans fade away through the darknesss. I can be mildly successful and get lower grades but if I get lower grades, my self-worth starting to shake.

These all things depend on which way I was raised on in the end. I was raised to be perfect, I had to be best at all the things that I do. I was thinking like if I don’t be the best, not involving in that thing is the best.

A while ago I read an article about how your upbringing affects applying for job interviews. In the article, they found out usually boys were raised to be brave and girls were raised to be perfect. With this way, if a boy fulfill 20 percent of the job criteria, he apply for that job. But girls apply jobs if only they fulfill the 80 percent of the job criteria. I may don’t remember the numbers correctly, but it was approximately like these and I don’t want to generalize according to gender. The main point that I want to share, the way we were raised affects us in a number of ways. We need to be aware of which way we were raised and before the blindly accept the circumstances, we have to think on it and try to reverse those bad ways of thinking to healthier forms.

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

I poured out some of my anger finally. When all these things happening, I was taking some wonderful deep learning courses from Coursera. It was a precious experience, I learned wonderful things and I completed the specialization finally. In the same time, I was feeling that I don’t give enough attention to my programming projects. By the way, in this time around, we applied for an entrepreneur competition, we worked so hard on our idea, but we’re not chosen. All these things build up and I burned out. I start to feel like I’m getting behind. I thought that the answer is in the productivity. I’m not productive, so if I will be more productive, I can sort out everything. This thought led me more exhausting and complicated point.

Thinking about the word productivity overwhelms me and I don’t know why. So I did a mind-association map for the word productivity. It really reminded me of materialistic, bad things. I was becoming monotonous, I lost my joyful self for the sake of tick all the things in my to-do list. I was going to fast and I was seeing only a blur.

I need to have an another perspective. So I asked my sister what came to her mind when she thinks the word productivity. She said a lot of wonderful things. I started to question how can we think so differently like this. Then I realized that we aren’t thinking the same word.

She was thinking ‘verimlilik’ word because we’re talking Turkish. I was thinking the word ‘productivity’. So I looked up the origins of these two words. I put the links so you can look at what they meant. These two words have one big point that differentiate them from each other. One of them created for economic values and capitalism only for materialistic use, other one contains so much deeper meaning and it contains a more fulfilling purpose. This created a paradigm shift for me in two ways.

The source from which you learn the information is as important as the information itself. ‘Medium is the message’ like Marshall McLuhan said. We learned productivity word from different sources and these sources created our approach to this word. So I need to choose and filter my sources to think in a healthier way.

Another paradigm shift is how I think the word productivity. I can say that nowadays, I can approach this word in a healthier way. It expanded and gain a meaning for me in a deeper sense.

Thanks for reading🖖