Lunch for today was "survival stew". Similar to Korean 부대 찌개 "Army Stew", it consisted of whatever ingredients were available, served with some rice. Ah! The taste of austerity.

This time, it didn't taste excellent, but that's how stuff goes. Every meal every time doesn't need to be excellent; sometimes we just have better/worse ingredients available.

This cooking experience reminds me of something I am trying to do in other domains of life. That is...

tl;dr

• "Don't be a hipster"
• 똑바로 해

Getting comfortable with standard tools

Historically, there have been different schools or styles of cooking. Different regions of planet earth had different ingredients available, different cultural taboos, etc. And so cuisines developed around core ingredients and time-tested methods to make those ingredients taste good, kill disease, etc.

Cooking is very daunting if you are always jumping around trying to make this-and-that culture's ingredients. You may even find yourself buying specialized tools for all sorts of specific tasks (e.g. a torch thing for Crème brûlée, a fancy wok for some South Chinese style stir-fry).

In a similar way, it pays to learn some standard tools well in other domains. Jumping around and chasing diversity ("spreading yourself too thin") is no bueno.

• Computer: lots of unix things; computer science fundamentals
• Music: Look at common, well-regarded music. Don't get lost in equipment. Focus on core skills...
• Languages: standard usage; common colloquial stuff (don't go down rabbit hole of dialects and stuff unless you have a specific social reason to do so)

Knowing the "vanilla" defaults well gives you more freedom because you can only make variations of the "default" when you first know the default.

Literary Aside

What good are novels/movies/etc. flipping over narratives left and right when the main audience no longer knows the default narrative? The overly flipped narratives become the default narrative. And suddenly the old dusty book has the edgy take.