Jack Of All!

I'm Vedant. 25, software engineer, which is the answer I give when someone asks what I do, because it's the answer that ends the conversation fastest. It's also true. It pays for everything else in this post.

The everything else being: writing poetry, a trip every two or three months, films at a rate that would concern a therapist, these blogs, coffee I make myself in a way that has become slightly embarrassing to explain, and since a few months ago, music. It's on Spotify!

I want to be careful about how this reads, because there's a way of writing this post that is really just a man listing his hobbies and hoping you're impressed. That post is easy to write and boring to read. What I actually want to talk about is what happens inside your head when you keep walking into things you have no business being in, and why I can't seem to stop.

The coffee, since we're already here

I own a grinder. I own a scale that measures to 0.1 grams. I have a kettle with a thin spout, which exists purely so that water comes out slowly, which is a thing I did not know I needed until I needed it. I am fully aware of what happened to me. Somewhere a marketing team sat in a room and decided that men in their mid twenties would pay 800 rupees for beans with a tasting note that says "stone fruit", and I walked into that room voluntarily and said yes, and then I bought a second bag.

Here's the thing though. For the first four or five months, I never tasted the stone fruit. I tasted coffee. Sometimes bitter coffee, sometimes sour coffee, mostly just brown and hot and fine. I kept thinking the tasting notes were a con, a shared fiction that coffee people agreed to maintain so they could keep charging more.

And then one morning it was there. Just a very subtle sweetness at the back of the sip that was unmistakably a fruit and not a bean. And what got me was not that I finally tasted it. It was the realisation that it had been in every cup before that, and I had been the one who couldn't feel it.

My tongue didn't change. The coffee didn't change. My attention changed! Four months of paying close attention to one small thing had quietly built a new sense in me that I didn't have in January.

You can't get that from reading about coffee. You can read every article about extraction and origin and roast level, understand all of it, explain it at a party, and still your mouth won't know a single thing. That knowledge only exists on the other side of doing it badly for a while.

First person or nothing

Most of what we consume is the third person view. Someone else went, someone else made it, someone else felt it, and we get the summary. A fifteen minute video explains sidechain compression (some cool word regarding music production) with a neat diagram. A reel shows you three seconds of a city. A review tells you what the film is about. You come away feeling informed, and informed is a genuinely nice feeling, and it costs almost nothing.

But it's the wrong kind of knowing, at least for me. Because the summary is always about the thing, and I want to know what it's like to be the person inside the thing.

When I opened a DAW(Digital Audio Workstation) for the first time, I understood nothing. There were maybe forty small boxes on screen and I could not have told you what a single one did. I made something that day that was so bad it was almost funny, four bars of a loop that sounded like a phone on vibrate. But somewhere around the third or fourth week, I found myself at 1 am dragging a hi-hat back and forth by a few milliseconds, absolutely convinced this was the difference between the track working and not working. Nobody would ever notice it. I'm not sure I would have noticed it. And I sat there for forty minutes on that one sound.

That night is the whole thing for me. Not the track, which is unremarkable. The fact that some part of my brain had grown ears for a detail that was completely invisible to me a month earlier.

And here's the side effect nobody warns you about. It ruins the passive version forever. I cannot listen to a song the way I used to. I hear the space around the vocal now, I notice when a producer drops everything out before a chorus so the chorus hits harder, I catch the little cheats. Same with films, since I started paying attention to how a scene is lit, I can't unsee it, I sit in theatres watching where the light is coming from. Poetry did it to conversation, which is the strangest one, because now I notice how people actually speak, the repetitions, the way someone circles a thing three times before saying it.

Every hobby takes something you used to enjoy easily and makes it more complicated and more interesting. You lose the innocence and you gain the sense. I keep making that trade and I have never once regretted it.

The question everyone asks

So what's the plan with the music. Is the poetry going somewhere. Are you thinking of doing this full time.

I get why people ask. But the question has a shape to it, and the shape is: this only counts if it converts.

That's the thing I'd actually push back on, more than anything else in this post. We've built a culture where a hobby has to earn its place. It becomes a side hustle, or a personal brand, or a portfolio piece, or at minimum a good story in an interview. And it sounds harmless, it sounds like ambition, but what it quietly does is raise the cost of being bad at something. If everything you touch is supposed to become something, then trying and failing isn't a Saturday afternoon anymore, it's a loss. So you stop starting.

Most of what I attempt goes nowhere and I mean that literally. There are poems in my notes app that stopped mid line eight months ago and will stay there. There are project files I opened once, named "idea 3", and never touched again. There was a phase where I wanted to learn film photography, and it lasted about five weeks. None of that feels like waste to me. Each one left a small residue, some new thing I notice now that I didn't before, and the residue is the point. The ones that did take shape were mostly the ones I cared least about at the start, which I've stopped trying to explain.

There's a less flattering reading of all this, and I should probably say it. Maybe some of this is restlessness dressed up as curiosity. Maybe a person who keeps starting new things is also a person avoiding the harder work of getting properly good at one. I've sat with that thought more than once, usually late at night, and I don't have a clean rebuttal. I've just decided I'd rather be shallow across ten worlds than never see nine of them. Some weeks I believe that fully. Some weeks I'm less sure.

money, since it matters

I can do all this because my salary lands on the same date every month. That isn't a footnote, it's the foundation, and I'd be lying by omission if I framed this as pure curiosity.

Beans cost money. A trip every few months costs money. The grinder, the controller, the kettle with the thin spout, all money. I picked a career that pays predictably, and part of why I picked it was so my weekends could look like this. Plenty of people are curious about ten things and have the bandwidth for none of them, and that's a resource problem and not a personality problem. I landed in a good spot with reasonable timing and I'd rather say that plainly than let this post imply anyone can do it if they just want it enough.

How the week actually looks

I keep my weekends empty, and that's genuinely the whole method. I don't fill Saturday with plans I made three weeks ago, and I don't schedule the hobbies either, because the moment music becomes a 10 am slot it starts to feel like work and then I resent it. There's just an unclaimed four or five hours sitting there and I walk into it and do whatever I have the appetite for. Some Saturdays that's the DAW. Some Saturdays it's a film I've been avoiding because I know it'll wreck me. Some Saturdays I make the same coffee recipe I've made forty times, badly.

Do I get tired? Yes, often. But tiredness from something you chose sits differently in your body than tiredness from something you owe. One leaves you hollow and the other leaves you tired in a way you don't mind, and I only figured out the difference after a few months of noticing that Sunday nights felt fine even when Saturday had been full.

And plenty of weekends are nothing at all. I'm out with my friends doing absolutely nothing that produces anything, and those are some of the best ones. There's no streak to keep. If a month goes by and I don't open a single project file, nothing is lost, the whole thing just waits.

Anyway

I don't know if you can do five things at once, and I'd rather you didn't turn this into one more thing you're behind on. That would be the worst possible outcome of reading it.

But if there's something you've been circling for a while, telling yourself you'd need to be decent at it first, or that it should lead somewhere before it's worth the hours, I'd say pick this Saturday and go be bad at it. Four months from now you'll taste something in a cup that was always there.