...and I cannot forget another aspect of how I've found consistent success this year: the atmosphere. More specifically, synthwave, retrowave, outrun, cyberpunk et al music and culture, some sort of mesh between neo-80s and high-tech visions. I appreciate them because I find myself somewhere in the juxtaposition between an out-of-reach past and a brave new world future. The music is of Stranger Things, arcade gaming, and Ghost in the Shell/Bladerunner-type universes. It's the music of night drives through a city nightscape. Even the genre's color scheme pulls it altogether.

It's a bit of a geeky niche.

It's a bunch of unknown artists creating music for the sheer love of it. You won't find 100m YouTube visits. They are a bunch of Bandcamp and Soundcloud artists. But from my perspective, what does recognition matter? When I look at the Global Top 50, I only recognize a few names—HOW is Maroon 5 still popular...aren't they the '00s equivalent of Tonic?

Well, clearly, popularity is not my focus. And I don't mean to disparage baseline, appealing to the lowest common denominator, popular music. The metric is a numbers game that relies on the propensity of teen-into-college consumers to roam in herds—and that poor thirtysomething who grasps after the wind that is youth, but it is as silly as when this same tricenarian wears the clothes of their juniors.

I don't know if it applies to everyone, but there reaches a point in our lives where we do our own thing apart from the mainstream. It's like that huge shift that occurs from high school and leaping into the freedom that college provides.

As a college freshman, I was so used to the early morning regimen of my public schooling that I scheduled 8AM classes; thereafter, I kept backing that up. Toward the end of my undergrad, all I wanted was night classes, preferably the 3-hour, once-a-week variety. Now, grad school was a different beast altogether as I HAD to take once-a-week courses for the majority of my coursework with a few online classes thrown into the mix...well, there were those two summer classes that I took abroad for a month.

Flying back to the tangent, my point is that we reach a point where we do our own thing in the spirit of matching our own sensibilities.

...and furthermore, this has also led me to find a lot of success with my weightloss.