2023-01-07 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Saturday 🗓 Date: January 7, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 2 – Jan 8, 2023

I’m a little late on my Morning Pages today. For whatever reason, I often have an impulse to call these Mourning Pages, although I honestly don’t know why. I have a really positive affinity for them, despite struggling to do them today. I feel like I should be better about setting hard boundaries on these sorts of things — I must eat breakfast and do my morning pages before anything else, before showering, before leaving the house, before any of that. I often go, oh well I don’t have any food in the house so I’ll just go grab breakfast and then come back and do morning pages, but ah now I feel like playing a game or now I feel like checking in on work or whatever. That’s kinda BS, if we’re honest.

I’m quite tempted to get rid of this PC. I like having some separation between work and non-work (Mac and PC), but I also find that even just switching between my work Mac and my personal Mac isn’t quite enough. Maybe it’s because I’m tempted to code on both of them, but just having Overwatch on here makes me always play it.

As I typed that, I just went and removed the Battle.net launcher entirely from my PC. It’s such a waste of time, it’s basically just junk food. Also now that I’m thinking about it, I should get rid my personal Mac too. Github Workspaces means I don’t really even need to use a personal laptop for much besides what I use this PC for, so it doesn’t really matter anyways. It’s more portable, but I could always get like a Chromebook or something. I’m still tempted to get a Macbook air for whatever reason, or maybe even something wacky like an iPad with an external keyboard. I don’t know, I just want less stuff to worry about, and getting rid of this laptop would be amazing.

I think I just like feeling a bit less “pinned down” by all the things I own. I don’t know why at the moment, but especially with renting an apartment, big things feel, well, big. Like buying this couch felt like a big moment, and how that I have it, I’m like “get this shit out of my house.”

Jesus Christo I’m very distractable. I’ve just been fiddling around with codepaces for a bit now that I’m thinking about them, and while it’s great that I’m kinda obfuscating my old laptop, now I feel like I’m just making my life a bit more complicated. That’s not really it, let’s be honest. It’s that I feel like I’m maybe overengineering things or not really focused on what I want to be focused on. If I felt that hyperfocused on writing, I feel like I’d be happy as a clam. But like I’m spending all this energy on a code formatter — that’s both (1) fun, (2) easy, and (3) most likely pretty useless, in the cosmic scheme of things. Like don’t get me wrong, having Ruby be autoformatted is great, but also it’s like, why do we need to spend so much of my time on it. That reminds me, I need to write a talk soon, oops. That’s just in a few months.

I should probably start eating dinner again at some point. I guess it’s not the worst habit (since I generally eat a decent sized lunch), but I don’t really know.

Writing this feels a bit different than the prior two, mostly in that I don’t feel nearly like I’m just buzzing as I write it. Maybe that’s part of the deal, that sometimes you just feel a bit more slogged down. Is that a word? Bogged down? I’m kinda just shitting words out of my brain and seeing what they look like. They look a bit beige at the moment.

Skit, skat, skiddly-oh… Not sure why that just popped into my mind, and I also always envision John Johnson saying that despite the fact that he wasn’t actually playing that character at all.

I guess the crux of my discontent is, do you spend more time improving the things you’re bad at or doubling down on the things you’re good at. I’m really good at techincally-minded execution, but that’s not at all creative (well, it can be, but also not really). I always just want to hit the ground at a full sprint and keep doing the thing until it’s done. That’s both not really conducive to creative work and also not really conducive to a healthy, balanced life. It’s also made me excel in my career, so there’s that.

I think that’s true of much of my life — things that make me do well in e.g. school and work are really not the things I truly want, but they do garner a lot of praise and money. And those things are awfully addicting, the sweet, sickly honey that kills us. Ain’t that depressing. Should probably do something about that huh.

But the whole pack-things-up-and-become-a-monk-or-idk-move-into-the-mountains-and-homestead isn’t really great either. It’s isolated, which I’m not totally sold is good for me. But I feel like being 100% sure that either way — the normal-life-good-job way or the ascetic-slash-reclusive way — are really great. And those aren’t the only options! I just think I struggle to commit to either of them, and neither feel great. There’s probably alternatives, but ce la vie.

How does one know that they’re living a good life? Or rather that their life is being well-lived? I think I’m just a bit too tired to answer this question. I’ve also been staring at a screen for far longer than anyone should. I sometimes wonder if I’m simply over-resilient to boredom, or loneliness, or even just solitude, and that while my circumstances would be really painful for others, they feel just fine for me, and that’s totally fine. Like, I don’t really feel the need to have many social interactions. I just don’t! That’s really just an attempt at making my life more legible to others, but that’s not equivalent to a life well-lived.