I'm turning 18 and realize how useless I am.

I'm a week away from forever leaving behind childhood. Though I perfectly understand that reaching the milestone of having lived 567,648,000 seconds carries mere symbolic meaning, I believe it serves as a stressful but necessary reminder for me to evaluate my life up to this point and prepare myself going forward. This has proven to be a nightmare.

My life right now doesn't make much sense. I know this is my old INTP Ti function at play, but how tf does one logically explain my behaviors lately:
-Drinking alcohol
-Reading on AI and pondering the future of humanity
-Spending hours on Quora reading different perspectives on a same topic before moving on
-Weightlifting/exercising like mad
-Taking boxing lessons
-Killing my gains by periods of binge-eating
-Running around the city at night like a bad boy who dgaf
-Mass e-mailing Stanford CS/math professors
-Reading about 18th century and 19th century philosophers
-Learning data science from online tutorials
-Going to clubs
-Rapping and dancing around my house at night.
-Spending a ton of time applying to summer programs I don't want to go to (besides SPARC <3) and secretly hoping I get rejected so I don't have to go
-Listening to lectures given by Silicon Valley venture capitalists and trying to understand their thought process
-Getting addicted to playing chess with my close friend at school
-Writing raps (this is actually really fun)

My dreams, which used to be a source of inspiration, are now:
-Full of inappropriate sh*t
This likely means my dreams which ran on inspirationare now running on fumes.
-Simulations of random events which I'm a part of that're so eerily realistic I wonder if they'll happen in the future
This likely means the present is so insignificant that my mind is on autopilot exploring the future. This also means my low confidence in predicting the future.
-Conversations with acquaintances that I sometimes confuse with ones that actually happened
This means I'm probably lonely and desire human interaction.

After the difficult process of analyzing my actions and categorizing them under common themes, I believe my actions are motivated by two states of mind:
1. I'm fed up at how uncertain about the future I am.
2. I feel lonely and want to be cared for.

As a response to the first, I try to add structure to my life: reading/writing, setting tough new goals to keep busy and thinking/planning the future even when it's inefficient to do so so early (people I've talked to told me planning my life at 17 isn't very effective).

As a response to the second, I try to increase my objective attractiveness, get closer around people so I can observe them, and seek attention. I try to participate more in school activities, despite not being able to connect to most people at school. This actually makes me more tired and sadder since it's all superficial. I realized it's actually very easy for me to feel happy. Last week, I was in Japan, and I realized the happiest I felt during the trip was actually the last night, when my relatives and I played a few hours of poker (I'm actually so bad I ended up last). I also feel happy playing chess with my friend (I also usually lose; contrary to popular belief I'm not smart). In fact, just having someone who listens and tries to understand me makes me very, very, very happy. But because I'm Mr. Stanford and Mr. You're-My-[Kid's]-Role-Model, The Legend, the people who accept me for who I am are extremely low in supply (which is also why I place high value on the few who do).

Emotions have also had a spillover effect lately. Though I have systems in place that prevent emotions (which takes a lot of energy to analyze so I usually don't) from affecting my productivity and decision-making, I realize the maintenance cost of storing my emotions in a box are steadily increasing - mainly because the constant need to upgrade and buy larger boxes. Perhaps I took up rapping/writing forms of self-expression as ways to relieve some of my emotions, though this often isn't reliable and hard to maintain.

The thing is, my actions taken in response to state of mind #1 takes away from time for socialization, and my inaptness at planning the future makes me feel more vulnerable. This reinforces state of mind #2, which reinforces a feeling of worthlessness and uncertainty. This creates a loop that I find extremely hard to get out of.

Then again, I've fell into these crises before, but have always managed to delay them for later. I for some reason don't find it as urgent of a priority to get out of this loop and reinvigorate my productivity right now, simply because for the first time after years of hustling I can rest for a while. Taking advice from friend spartan168 at Stanford, it's probably wise to rest while I still can. Sadly, I simply don't know how to "enjoy" life.

To elaborate on the last point, I was so pissed when I had to go to vacation in Japan when I could've travelled to two cities in China to continue my job of guest speaking for my job. Instead, I had to walk around dumb gardens and take pictures under Sakura trees when I could've been inspiring hundreds of parents and students. This makes me feel fcking selfish. It also makes me realize enjoying life is an inverse-relation activity to my purpose in life - to improve the world and the people in it. Occasionally, I miss the days when I did math into ungodly hours at night - it was when I enjoyed doing something for myself while working towards my goals. Nowadays, I feel like my life is the sum of my "impact" in the world, the present meager amount of which makes me feel sadder.

In conclusion, by writing this post, I've identified my two main needs in life - (1) be in a position to create more and more meaningful impact and (2) people who accept me for who I am. Even though I try to do always what's most logical, I will keep these two fundamental values in mind for the rest of my [adult] life.

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I will make a final and last post on this blog next week when I turn 18 with some parting advice/notes/contact-info. The blog will be locked a few days after. This is my last life update on here folks.