id: conundrum title: Conundrum previous: ct date: 2025-02-08 ---

## Conundrum

I finished making the bed, and was hit by a moment of sadness. Layed there and put on a City and Colour album. My mind went to the insanity of modern life.

My fiance and I were out for lunch with a friend. On the way home we were both tired, when we got home she suggested that we take at nap. My response was "I will feel guilty"... We did sleep and in a small way I do.

There seems to be so little time to live that I felt guilty for taking rest on a Saturday afternoon. I felt that I was taking time from something. From myself maybe, from things that "had" to be done.

Laying there on the bed listening to the music letting my mind wander my thoughts came back to this. I have been having trouble finding motivation or interest lately. I dream and fantasize about working for people directly. Building more skills and really mastering some aspects of software development to try and write software like proper craftsmen build furniture. Something solid that lasts, something that people feel good about using. That means minimal dependencies, simple code, likely single function applications. It also means that I have to learn and implement a lot of things myself.

I have been mapping out various areas of learning and starting to think about projects that cover some of them. But the motivation to get started is rarely there. Some days it is and I lose myself in the problem solving and writing. I do love the process.

Most days thinking of it takes me to thinking about work and I find that distasteful. I am not proud of the code that I write there. I was for the first time with a refactor and simplification that I did on my own time. It made the code easier to reason about, seperated the application state from UI rendering, simplified testing. Co workers were very pleased, we all suspect that moving towards this proof of concept in our design will make our lives much easier. Management however saw nothing in it. Whenever any of us take on a project like that, to improve the quality of the code it always has to be on our own time. So without any space to do good work most of the time it is racing to hit deadlines and not being able to do work that we are proud of.

The less I code on my own time the more that lack of attention to detail at work eats away at me. The more that eats at me the less interested I am in coding at all.

This is a circuitous way of coming back around to the fact that we are kept busy. Needlessly so. Taking time that could be used improving our lives, learning, growing, living, and just gobbling it up with work to enrich people that we will never meet. Not helping society, likely causing damage in all honesty. Consuming needless resources, crushing small businesses and third party sellers.

Over a weekend we have time to do very little. See a friend, rest a bit, get ready for the week. Enough to survive and keep going in a steady state, but not to expand our horizons. To build something of my own with this schedule I feel like I have to give up most other things in life. Time for hobbies, friends, any time of just doing nothing, sleep.

I can't stand this endless focus on growth and gluttony for more. I am disgusted to be a part of this system, but don't have the energy required or the time to walk away at the moment in any sort of sustainable fashion.