I think this has been put in different words in different places before, but I’ve just realized how often I live this reality.
I go to work in the morning. I sit in my office chair with my keyboard with Cherry switches. Quiet, tactile. I stare at my two monitors for hours. Teams is on my laptop screen, reminding me of my corporate existence.
Terminal on monitor one with tmux. I keep opening new windows in the session because I lose track of which window was originally intended for which purpose. Vim is open at least five separate times. Some have one file, some have fifteen tabs with various files. Some have fifteen tabs open to the same file. “Where did that pane go with the long command I don’t want to type out again?” I have no idea. I type the command out again.
The computer will not do what I want it to do. I threaten the computer. The computer will still not do what I want it to do. I bargain with the computer. Load average is 16. This computer is an embedded system with four cores. That’s bad. I move the computer to a different port on the network switch. The load average is 0.75. That’s good. However, that makes no sense.
Firefox on the other monitor. Half of the thirty tabs are Stack Exchange. The other half are the community forum for the chip vendor for our embedded system. None of the tabs contain useful information.
I go home. I sit in my office chair with my keyboard with Cherry switches. These ones are clicky because my wife doesn’t have the heart to shank me over a loud keyboard. I stare at my two monitors for hours. No Teams.
I do the same thing. The details are different, but it’s just as painful. I’m upstairs, the computer I’m threatening is downstairs instead of in a nest of cables on my desk. I spend hours building a CUDA-based library, only to be told by the runtime that my drivers are too old. I need to tear out this runtime and install an older one. The computer cannot hear my threats due to the physical separation. Maybe I need to set a desk up in the basement.
I go to bed. Tomorrow, I will do the same thing.
edit: your concerns are appreciated, but I enjoy this cycle for reasons I do not comprehend. There is no spoon, there is no grass. There is only computer.
You probably need a new hobby. It’s ok to take life slow. Do it one piece at a time. There is a limit to how much you can work. I do computer stuff in my free time too. But you need to keep it to a minimum
You see, threatening computers at home recharges me. It prepares me to threaten computers at work. Breathes life into my veins and puts strong blood in my nostrils.
Maybe it’s time for a new hobby
This hobby is like work, so it’s productive. Doing productive things is good!
I am not even through a quarter of the article and I wanted to endorse it for being incredibly interesting and amusing, then I saw it was written by Bertrand Russel and in 1932. I was sure it was a more recent article
Carmy: “Cooking is not fun for me.”
Richie: “Yeah, but you love it.”
Carmy: “That doesn’t mean it’s fun.”
Richie: “If this shit is not fun for you, Cousin,what the fuck is fun for you?”
– The Bear, S2 E1
It’s all about the reward at the end of the tunnel. It’s all about telling myself the result will make the process worth it. It’s all about forgetting the pain so I’ll repeat the cycle.
One of my resolutions this year is to not sit in front of a screen if I need entertainment. I force myself to talk to family members at home or do stuff with my hands that feels satisfying like fixing the odd broken stuff in my house or helping out with groceries or cleaning work.
I disassembled the interior of a linen closet on Sunday and fixed a closet door latch, already met my home improvement quota for the week. The pile of dishes in the sink is an important part of my kitchen decor, so it stays. I have nothing else to do 😅
I can only recommens to get into hobbies like building dioramas, electorincs, music (there are daws like bitwig or ableton with free trials, its on the PC as well though), Start some sport, i like bouldering because you basically sit around all the time and then climb some routes and talk with friends. Or be creative with cooking! The only thing is to just start doing something new. Its always fun!
To be honest there are 4 things that combine in a bad way. Sorry if that is too forward, I don’t know you and its just what I’ve read here. So dont take it the wrong way.
- you seem to have very high expectations of yourself, which is great but you burn out quck that way. You seem to not want to give up and fail
- you seem to be stuck in your day to day rhythm
- you seem kind of burned out or depressed
- you seem to have a lack of input, variation and aktually kind of life
Try to break your day to day cycle and be kind to yourself :)
I’ve found that lego, gunpla, or 3d printing do a really good job of keeping you off of a computer.
I have two sons who play Fortnite, and they taught me what it means to touch grass.
That might help.🤷♂️
It is winter, no grass. Does snow work?
Due to the added experience of freezing probably a lot better than grass.
I work from home, most days, so I was doing that while staring at the same monitor and typing on the same keyboard.
After catching myself on the way to burning out, I was advised to stop working on time and go work out or take a walk - something physical to mentally change modes.
I agree with all the advice here to get a different hobby or touch grass.
I have the benefit (? depends on who you ask) of working from an office and I bike to work, so there’s some nice physical activity separating work from home. I don’t like going over 40 hours a week at work, I’m pretty good about that. More time to threaten computers at home instead of at work.
It’s get home, make dinner for myself and my wife, watch an episode of Deep Space Nine and talk about our days, then I go upstairs to be a monkey at a typewriter.
That’s good, but you’re still the perfect of that meme where the stick figure is looking at the computer while the weather changes outside the window. By your account, that is.
Since it sounds like that’s a source of stress or unease for you, I think you could experiment with a “month of drawing” of “month of evening bike rides” or something like that. I love problem-solving and development, so it’s easy to look for that thrill outside of work too, but you may find a different thrill that gives you more variety and you also find rewarding.
In my case, I often get away from computers by going out on photo walks. Then I get home and stare at my photos on the computer. Hehe. It’s good to have that outlet all the same.
You might want to find a different variety of threats
Sometimes I threaten microcontrollers instead of computers. Both at work and at home. Does that count?
You seem to only be changing the subjects that you are threatening.
Try also changing the types of threats you give to those subjects. Easier to keep them in line.I’ll start to include “being repurposed as a Bitcoin miner”.
