Epiphany

It's been two months since my last update. I've been busy. I guess. Or lazy. Hard to say.

I do know that I'm struglling again with motivation. I don't seem to be able to move like I used to. I'm a bit stuck behind the screen. I tend to lose myself in Youtube (mostly Shorts) or doomscrolling Reddit. I am aware of these habits and I have a bit more power to disengage with them and for this I am grateful. Else I'll lose myself.

My best friend told me recently he's lost desire to do anything but watch Youtube. I hear him loud and clear. I've been able to remove myself from social media¹, but I haven't been able to kick the Reddit habit. There's a lot of utility in Reddit and Youtube, and they are designed to keep you on that site. Much like AI chat is designed to keep you engaged and on that site. Our shorter attention spans are klilling us slowly and we don;t even notice it.

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1. I recognize that Reddit is often referred to as social media, though I don't agree with that, it's more of an unstructured message board. Now that I wrote that, social media is a collection of unstructured message boards… fuck.

I've been feeling off lately. I am not sure how long I've been feeling it and it might have a lot to do with the passing of my father. It took a while to find the right words to describe what I feel and I think I can succinctly describe it as follows:

I have the desire, and lack the motivation.

I have a list of things I want to do, yet I really struggle with the actual doing of things. I attribute this to laziness, though my partner is inclined to not belive this at all and instead tells me that she doesn't see lazy when she looks at me or what I do.

My strength is perseverance, it's also my weakness. I persevere through a lot. I have the thought that I do a lot, and that's not enough. I was talkign to friends this past weekend and the feeling is mutual amongst us. On Friday I came across a post on Reddit that resonates with me. It does a better job of describing how I feel about myself than I seemingly can.

In an effort to help myself with this, I've stopped multi-tasking most things. I'm no longer listening to podcasts while I work. I don't have the idiot box on in the background while I work on my hobbies. I don't have any media playing in the background while I do dishes, or shower. I'm cutting off the sources of noise that may be contributing to my overload. I'm not sure this will work or is sustainable. After all, I am arguably less productive with not consuming media while I do tasks. I have the thought that ultimately this will be in my favour, as I'll be inclined to give up some podcasts that no longer help me. It's a task I've been long delaying.

I will report back here and see how it's been going in a month.

Read this post from the NY Times. When I did it wasn't paywalled. It's epic. Though I can't comment much on it now, as it's now paywalled for me, though I suspect that is due to my already having read it. Hopefully you will fare better.

I was reading an article this morning. As I was reading the following passage I had a memory about a conversion with a previous boss some 20 years ago.

Thus, as Mark Atwood, an open source policy expert, pointed out on Twitter, he had to keep telling Amazon to not do things that would mess up FFmpeg because, he had to keep explaining to his bosses that “They are not a vendor, there is no NDA, we have no leverage, your VP has refused to help fund them, and they could kill three major product lines tomorrow with an email. So, stop, and listen to me … ”

I had found some open source software that I wanted to use and could not convince my boss it was a good idea. I now have the thought that he might have foreseen an issue where the company relied heavily on the software that was no longer maintained and could not be updated without significant cost.

As we barrel forward through technology, issues brought forth as indicated in the article cause me to pause. What systems do I use now that rely on the kindness of strangers whom are maintaing their projects out of passion? What if that passion fades? We're already seeing this in video games. Some publishers decided to make their cames function only online and as new games come out, the servers that power this game gets used less. This causes them to shut it down due to costs to maintain. They game you paid $80 for 5 years ago is now useless, save as a coaster (if it's a disc) or a curiosity. Meanwhile we have games that are literally 40 years old that run just fine (as long as you have the original hardware in good working order and your TV has the requisite interface to dispaly the video signal from the hardware). Still, not-so-old TVs have the ports, and most of the vintage consoles I own still function just fine.

I used to claim that I had technolust. Now I'm older, perhaps a little wiser. I still like new tech and get excited about the possibilites afforded by ever advancing technology. I think Open Source software is awesome and will continue to use it. I am grateful for the authors and maintainers who keep that software running. I wonder if maybe it's advancing too quickly.