“Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. (…) You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.”

An excellent explanation of burnout by Isaac Yonemoto. Simply put, your brain needs success – no matter how small.

You know things are not going well when you start searching for a job and the only one that consistently keeps popping up in searches is the one you recently left.

Featuring a photo by my friend Damian Nowakowski. We played some games on a retro C64 today – and pondered over how the technology has changed so quickly. Even the 5 ¼” floppies seemed bigger when we were kids…

I just ditched Facebook. The plan to deactivate the account was born long ago, and every time I tried I to do it had some kind of fear it would make my life harder. The excuses I gave were really pathetic, like I need it for social login or how am I going to manage my pages? It was always hypothetical, and right now is the time to find out.

Recently I had some trouble staying in touch with the reality. I don’t mean anything deep here – just the usual stuff of work, friends, family, et cetera. The recent trip just intensified this feeling, since I tried to live the life I always did in a different reality – creating a bigger, more noticeable gap. A gap like this creates a cognitive dissonance, a very unpleasant feeling – unpleasant for the simple reason that in evolutionary context denial meant death. In modern life, this is no longer the case – but it still means lost opportunities and wasted lifes.

I’m basically in denial. It’s easy to pretend you’re living some sort of life – and much harder to actually live it. It’s easy to pretend you’re fixing problems while not really doing anything. It’s easy to run without ever getting anywhere.

It’s time to get out, not away. Here comes the hard part: actually doing something with my life.

* * *

I think I’m starting to understand the motive behind _why’s history and disappearance. Having a brilliant coder mind often comes at a price; and what is a gift is also a curse. I’ve heard of developers going insane – of people burning out and ending up in mental institutions, of sysadmins abandoning their families, drinking in excess and working crappy jobs Bukowski-style just to get away.

It’s frightening to know it is always lurking out there. How do you ever live knowing that your brain is always ready to turn your life into a complete mess? But then, this is also the nature of our bodies, and the world too. I might just as likely get clobbered by a tram tomorrow.

Aaron’s death sparked some talk about how we really need to do something about depression and suicide in IT industry. The point is, what should we do? How do we actually help people? _why did something wonderful by simply coming out and acting all weird and quirky while still gaining a cult following – and even he, at some point, cut all ties and disappeared for years.

Nope. I still don’t get it.

The sound of scanner has been drilling through my head for the last few days – I almost hear it in my sleep. For every roll of film I manage to scan I develop two more; it seems never ending. I think I’m about halfway through.

I’ve seen the raw scans. Can’t share anything with you yet – it would be like serving a soup without any spices or a salad which should be a part of a four course meal. But I’ve seen them, and got that big grin on my face once I imported them into Lightroom and saw they were good.

The photos more than make up for all the tediousness of the process.

Doing the spring cleaning on a server of mine today, I keep stumbling upon artifacts of the good old times. Hidden deep inside the UNIX directory structure are remains of awesome projects, logs of chats with brilliant people, user accounts not used for years and long forgotten Subversion repositories containing projects so hackish I wonder why did I ever write them.

Such was the technology world before I discovered Facebook and whiskey. Once I did, I was out of the game for some years.

Fast forwarding to today, everything seems to be made of AWS, Heroku and Github. We see neither the machines nor the people behind them. Experienced UNIX engineers seem to be a dying breed, being quickly outnumbered by overzealous unit test writers.

Has the world changed, or is it just me?