Pikkulog

A shorter gemlog for rambly things.

2021-08-28 (Sat)

It's been a pretty crazy month for work. But now I'm glad I can put it down for a while, at least. I took two days off on top of this weekend to spend just chilling out, and I've been looking forward to it -- and I have maybe another two weeks' worth of leave to take before the end of the year, so there's that also.

One of my colleagues is leaving: I'm happy for him, but also somewhat bummed out by it. We joined at the same time and for whatever reason got along well, and now he's leaving. There's not many of us left from when I joined, either, so now I'm left feeling a bit at loose ends. What am I still doing here? It's just one more reminder that it's time to leave and move on, even if it's comfortable. The team I work with won't stay forever, either.

I think more generally my views on work and career have crystallised after the past few years, and while I felt torn between two choices when I was younger, at this point the decision has pretty much been made. The entire concept of a career now seems to be mostly just an artificial treadmill of external validation, and it feels as if the only honest way of living is to disengage from it entirely when making decisions on how one is to live.

Then again, it's also been the case that I've come to feel disillusioned by my experiences. I don't just feel disenchanted by the ideas of working and building a career, I feel disenchanted with my entire substantive area of work, and while I've met and worked with good people, I've also realised my views have become even more cynical. I feel tarnished, and perhaps it might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that I have lost a good deal of faith, or that I feel as though my soul has been somewhat corroded.

2021-08-22 (Sun)

My desktop computer broke recently. It wasn't much -- one component failed, but could be replaced cheaply, so I arranged to do so. The issue was that the component in question had to be ordered off Amazon, and it took a while for it to arrive. In the meanwhile: no desktop. This wasn't an issue for me, by and large, because I can do most things on my laptop. The problem was that I used the desktop for gaming. So that meant no gaming for me for maybe a week and a half.

I think the experience has been a good one. Before this happened, gaming was as much or more habitual than intentional: it's the evening, let's boot up the desktop and see what we can play. That wasn't an option anymore, and while the first couple of evenings were weird, I settled into a routine of doing basically everything else. Reading, listening to music, going out for walks, sometimes writing. Some days I'd just want to do something mindless, after a long day, and I'd watch videos on YouTube for a bit.

I did get the desktop computer fixed, which has been useful because gaming is also a way for me to spend time with friends I can't meet in person, and one more thing I can do together with the friends I do meet up with -- but I've not gone back to habitual gaming so far, and on the whole I prefer spending less time gaming and more time doing other things so far.

2021-08-13 (Fri)

I've been thinking that I should reduce my engagement with social media even further. I rarely use Facebook these days, and I never signed up for either Twitter or Instagram. I do use Reddit and I'm also on the Fediverse, though, and it's those platforms I'm thinking of disengaging with further.

I mean, they're nice if you want to look at cat photos or cool art, if you follow the right people and curate your feed.

I think the intuition behind this was the realisation that in a certain sense platforms like Reddit and Twitter can be polarising, outrage-inducing. Why? I don't know, but if I had to guess:

Large groups mean there's usually less sense of a community as composed of individuals known to one another, and more a sense of a community as defined in terms of orthodox and deviant beliefs and attitudes.

That in turn makes it easier for people to react strongly to perceived deviant beliefs; it's easier to turn on a stranger with a bad take than a friend with a bad take, and differences of opinion more easily categorise into differences in identity.

Feedback in the form of upvotes, awards, replies that are supportive or in agreement, etc. in turn provides a positive feedback cycle. Dunking requires less effort than effort-posting, while offering similar prospects of returns (upvotes, awards, agreement/validation, etc.) and so benefits disproportionately.

All of that is a guess, but I think I came to this conclusion in practice after seeing yet another outraged mob collectively piling on someone on the Fediverse, and realising that I was similarly letting myself get outraged on Reddit.

And here's the thing -- that mob wasn't wrong, and I don't think I was wrong to be outraged about the things I was outraged about -- but on a meta level, I don't want to carry that outrage around with me. I can be an asshole. But I don't *have* to be one. And I would like to try being a kinder and more chill sort of person.

2021-08-05 (Thu)

I realise I've been away from this space for just over three months. Strange to think about it in those terms. Strange to think that a quarter of a year has passed, just like that. What did I get up to during the period from May to July? As I write this I realise I don't really know how to answer the question.

Time has been weird since the pandemic started.

The weeks pass by so smoothly that it takes effort to remember things that I did.

I went to the beach on the weekend. Was it last weekend, or the weekend before? It takes me a moment to line events up in my mind and recall it was last Sunday. I went for a walk in the late afternoon and found myself by the river at sunset, pausing to take photos as everything slowly drained away into night.

I remember that I read Moby Dick. When did I read it? I don't know, only that it must have been sometime during that period. I remember mentioning it to a friend, but not when I did so.

I remember having taken photos. It almost feels like I have to look at the photos I took to remember having taken them. What did I do? "Yes, I remember this. I went for a walk on a rainy night to try and photograph the way light reflects on rain-slicked streets. That was what I did."

Now that I think about it, that walk by the river last Sunday was what, four days ago? But it feels like yesterday. And tomorrow will already be Friday. Then what? Another weekend, and another Monday, that will go down the throat as slickly as a raw egg.

EOF