0x1FFD

I understand that society created the construct of time to facilitate collaboration and create accountable systems.

But…,
it can be easy to lose a sense of your personal time as you continue working towards a particular goal. I do not like the idea of relying on alarms and calendars all the time to keep track of my progress all that I choose to pursue.

So…,
I’m continuing a practice that I practiced for a short while during the last summer. It helped me keep track of time with a more personal touch and reminds me to decouple myself from what’s going on with the world calendar in the moment.

I’ll be maintaining a mental hex counter for the number of days I’ve been alive - without, hopefully, calculating it each day.

It helps me be more aware of how I’m spending the day and also gives me a implicit long term progress tracker.

Logging the specifics with some more detail:

The Gregorian Calendar is non-uniform

• I don’t like exceptions.
• There’s just too many in what we use these days.

Hex over Decimal cause…

• In case I forget the counter, I’ll be doing the conversion on paper
  • no functions
  • It makes forgetting a more penalizing activity.
• Humans can always naturally count in bits (morse is universal) but if we lose a couple of digits some day, decimal is not so convenient anymore.
• Hex makes intrigues more humans: it’s a good conversation starter.

Time dilation

• Just counting the days I’ve been alive made the months go much slower (only perceptually of course)
• helps me not turn into a zombie and keep track of my long term goals

Being more aware of ranges

• dedicating 64 days towards an objective allows me divide my work smartly compared to saying I’ve 2 months for something.
• It’s a semiotics thing: a “month” is not something I personally relate to when recording progress but “days” helps me imagine what each one of those days in different phases of that duration might need to look like to not just dream about doing stuff and actually make practical plans.
• I’ll be timestamping my blogs henceforth here as well (it’s a practice I began from my second blog) and in the long run, it’ll help me better gauge what I’ve achieved in the past.
  • again it’s a semiotics thing for me : I’ll choose 256 days rather than 1 year to check my growth: my brain just activates different pathways even though they’re periods of similar scales: seeing zeros on the hex counter feels cool.

It’s Personal

• The earth’s been there for I don’t know how long(exactly).
• I’m a philosophical lad : we think about the endings and origins of things pretty frequently.
• a personal counter helps me stay practical and not lose track of the present when I’m being a tad bit delusional.
• I also happen to be just in time to reinitialize this oddity to experience 0x2000 in an aware manner.