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Maybe it's a familiar pattern for some of you: your interest for something — a project to do, a language to learn, a new domain to explore — enters in your life, quickly builds up steam and occupy you a lot to a point nearing obsession, then you slowly (or abruptly!) move on to something else.
This happens to me a lot but I did not see how regular the pattern is until recently. The cycle is:
I learn about something cool to read about, or have an idea about a software project, or my interest about getting involved into some activity is piqued.
I start working on it, and in a matter of a few days I pretty much forget about my other interests.
More or less six weeks later, I'm burning out of the thing.
I either jump to the next pattern of something else, or rest some time before getting caught up by the pattern again.
Six weeks? Yes, approximately! Well, something between 4 and 8 weeks. I started to notice this recurring time span when I tried to remember what I was doing during the previous months. Looking through the commit logs of various big projects, the pattern became a bit clearer. I've put poor examples in a data file below.
> OK dece, so what's so interesting about that? 🥱
It's kinda bad. If some things are not really abandoned and are picked up again later, it clearly smells like burning out sometimes. I have many repos with steady activity from the start to a day suddenly followed by eternal silence alone. I have learning topics that I started to educate myself about passionately only to stop before gaining an actual expertise. I don't want projects ending up half-baked and mostly unusable, nor do I want to merely scratch the surface of fields that I deeply want to know more about. What was that time spent for then, the experience, the journey?
I have a bit of an idea actually: six weeks seems like the adequate amount of focused time for learning enough about something, or building enough of a larger project, to have a much clearer vision of what is actually needed to reach the next step of expertise or realisation.
After six weeks of working on my chess engine, I learned enough technical jargon to understand how the best engines are made.
After six weeks of playing and reading about chess, I learned enough to understand what grand masters do to play so well, how they trained to get there, how to enjoy watching professional games and the overall difficulty of further improvement to get on a better level.
After six weeks of most of my probably-too-big-for-me software projects, I know that it's just the start of the road and I'm getting unsure that it's worth going on. The journey has been a fun exploratory walk through the fog, but we left Boletaria and the road ahead of us, more often than not, is quite longer than expected. Should I pursue, or warp back to the Nexus and move on to something else?
When discussing about it with my mother, she noted that six weeks was the usual time span spent at school between two vacations, and that maybe a part of me kept using this span as a reference frame for focus! As much as I find the idea interesting, it would make more sense if I actually cared about school back then… 🏫🤺
Could it be that I'm simply, as Wikipedia put it in this saying's page, a generalist rather than a specialist? It feels uncomfortable: a part of me would like to be recognized for a particular skill, even though I'm unsure which. I want to make awesome music, but can't spend the time to actually get good at anything here. I want to draw awesome pieces, but I can't bring myself to pick a medium to improve on. I want to be an awesome programmer but at the same time is there really a point? Damn ego, make up your mind!
On the other hand, I could accept that I'm just too curious to fixate on things for too long. Being curious is a quality, right? And one I can definitely resonate with! Sooooo many things to read and write and code and build and so many people to meet, spend time with and love! Why the fuck should I stay focused longer on chess openings, there is so much more to do!
Jack of all trades, master of none.
Why not.
How about scared of the passing time?
Fear of missing out is a plausible hypothesis. After a few weeks of focused work, the world around stops being silent and the presence of things left behind gets noticeable again. Oh yeah, I still had this thing to do when I started. Damn, I completely forgot that I stopped reading this book before opening this one.
Could it be that I do fear too much about missing out on things that I don't know yet? Of not having enough time in general to explore them? Is it the broad, distant anxiety to go through life without finding the thing that would've make the story so much more worthwhile? Without a doubt, this is something that has been on my mind. Story time!
A year ago I joined a Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) club. It's a martial art without direct hits and a heavy use of the legs and ground positions. If you saw me once IRL, the idea of seeing myself practicing something along those lines could have make you chuckle; strength ain't something I've really focused on yet (or, to be fair, probably six weeks in my entire life haha). Doing BJJ in Seine-Saint-Denis, France, is not for the faint of heart. The people, both beginners and experts, are both strong and determined to continuously improve. Well, long story short, I could attend two exhausting sessions before hurting my back enough to prevent me from going for a few months, after that there was a COVID lock-down, and well I dropped out.
Going home from this second and last session, I had some kind of epiphany: even though going to BJJ and getting wrecked would look absurd for an outside spectator, at the same time it made perfect sense in the perspective of my actions during the last years. A sentence spontaneously came to my mind to encapsulate that feeling, in those moments of deep realisation that you are at the right place at the right time (but that's for another note), translated as best as I can: “Leave no aspects of human culture untouched”. Yes, there is no single human culture and this makes no sense, but this is how it sounded.
That's what I live by! Looking for unknown aspects of other cultures around me with curiosity and without fear! The people and their art, the science and the stories. Of course time is going to press when there's always so much to discover!
Wow this got out of hand! Let's try to wrap up a bit.
About the fatigue of abandoning stuff, it's been a few years now since I've wanted to organise my time better. Define what I want to do, and organise myself to work on it regularly instead of binging on something and drop out. Judging from the flood above, maybe it's time to give it a serious attempt.
About the fear of missing out, further thinking has to be done about whether it is sane or not. Surely being permanently in a anxious state is not healthy, but at the same time it can be a good driver, right?
Let me know your thoughts, and all the best for whatever you planned to do this year ♥
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