>DATE: Sat Oct 08 09:20 CDT 2022

A crisis of interests: I don't know how to spend my free time

>Author's note: if, like me, you have a painfully short attention span, the most important part to read is the last section.

The road behind

The title says it all. If you've read the last two log posts you know that I gave myself an ultimatum to do something creative with my engineering knowledge. This is me reneging on that. You see, I enjoy doing all sorts of things, but few things continue to hold my attention and interest beyond the first few exposures. Other things do manage to do this, but I live with so little planning for subsequent days that it might as well not matter. This crisis of interests is not necessarily new to me.

Thinking back to high school and college, I rarely planned anything ahead of time. I tended more to go with the flow of life. Fortunately my parents took care to get me out and about with camping and fishing trips, and I was involved in FIRST robotics since elementary school. So I definitely had fun things to do that I was actively interested in. Then came high school and college.

As I progressed to and through adulthood, I became more and more focused on getting a bachelor's degree. In middle and high school this meant taking certain classes to get good scholarships, as well as any classes that could give reduce the number of courses I would need to take in college. During my sophomore year of high school, I did homework on the weekends consistently and for many hours for the first time. Unfortunately, that would be a consistent weekend occupation until I graduated college with my bachelor's degree.

I still had time to the things I wanted, but I became more of a workaholic. Procrastination combined with the stress of doing fun things while I still had coursework to do kept me pretty locked into a scholastic mindset.

To make matters worse, my plans growing up only extended so far as to "being an engineer." In middle school, I wanted to be a civil engineer. I liked math and wanted to do something more closely related to what my dad did for a living as a landscaper. In high school, I was exposed to computer programming and instantly fell in love with that. This would lead me to start college pursuing computer science. It wasn't until my second semester of college that I realized I would never learn how the computer hardware worked as a computer science major, so I switched to computer engineering — the type of bachelor's degree I hold today.

After graduating, I remained nearsighted. My focus was simply to get a job where I could apply my four to eight years of hard work towards my degree. Now that I have that job, I continue to go from day to day doing the bare minimum to get by outside of my job. I still only get together with coworkers, friends, and family when they bring up the topic. I never think of such things. I've been trying over the last month or so to change that.

I'm not sure that I'll ever do outside of work what I aimed to do two posts back. My aim now is simply to live a healthy lifestyle. As for hobbies, as much as I enjoy engineering, I think I get my fair share during the work week, at least for now. I like outdoor activities and participating in sports without too much of a competitive aim. I also find myself doing a lot of customization to my Linux setup.

The road ahead

I've begun to notice a decreased mental and physical capacity for many of the positive things in life, but, at least recently, I believe that is not due to the behaviors depicted above. After all, I don't work more than 40 hours a week and have more free time on my hands than I've had in roughly eight years (outside of summer vacations). For some time, I've been struggling to eat healthy and be motivated to exercise. That is slowly changing, but perhaps not fast enough to halt my decline. I find myself less mentally capable and present at work now than when I started my current job earlier this year. During the last few days of this week in particular, I was mostly on autopilot and barely thinking for myself.

Though, I suppose the more recent downs might be due to caffeine withdrawal since I have long used coffee and light snacks to make it to lunch. I often don't get out of bed on time and thus don't eat breakfast most work days. That needs to change. The simple solution is not to stay up too late, but like many things, in practice that is hardly simple.

My key takeaways from this are that if you struggle to feel motivated in life when everything else seems to be in order, it is time to step back and examine your lifestyle. Personally, I need to correct my diet, exercise more, and maintain a regular sleep schedule. Those basic things can do a lot to invigorate you when you do them right. I know this firsthand but struggle to maintain such habits with any consistency.

I believe that if I can improve my core lifestyle, I will have the motivation to take the reigns and the mental capacity and creativity to guide my life in a more positive direction. When you go through life just living one day to the next for longer than a few weeks and you lack an external cause, then that is a sign something is not as it should be. Upon recognizing that, you should first reexamine your lifestyle, and failing that, your mental health.