Maybes of Life
This is a maybe-series post. A post that might start a life-altering experience but I am not going to call it that since I acknowledge the quitter side of me. Life also has its own ways to alter itself, it doesn't need my interference. So let's not start something we never really wanted to keep up anyway; at best only for the looks of it. Let's just go with the flow and be inspired by water. I think it has some things figured out that we can learn from it.
For example, water just exists. It ebbs and flows but it doesn't start writing something on Stacker News with no idea about what except the desire to do something meaningful; just to submit the post in a split-second decision in the end because it took too long again, you lost your motivation one hour ago and wonder if you just wasted your time again:
What was it all for? Was it worth my time?
I think it was for me and I am worth my own time. For example, we can learn that we're alive unlike water.
All of that sounded better in my head so let's just continue.
The Experience of Quitting
It's true, I am kind of a quitter. I like to quit things I like, especially if I excitedly proclaimed after the first few times that I am going to keep doing them forever. One of my earliest memories is the day I joined a soccer club as a kid. After I came home, I told my parents that it was SO MUCH FUN and I will go EVERY time. All I did that day was to sit on a bench for 89 minutes. In the last minute, the trainers must have decided that it was impossible for me to fuck the whole game up in a single minute now (we had a pretty big lead iirc) so I was exchanged in for someone else so I can see at least some action on my first day, I guess.
I didn't realize that it was the last minute so I thought this was the moment to proof prove to the world and myself that I was serious business. I wasn't here to fuck spiders. Being allowed to enter a soccer field while a real match was ongoing must have been the coolest thing that ever happened to me up to then. So cool that I decided that this should become my life-defining moment: standing in the corner of the field, eyes locked on the ball on the other side of the field and walking as if I am prepared for the best attempt from someone of that other side to rainbow-flick / marseille-turn me into oblivion like the next Ronaldinho.
What I didn't know that day was that this would instead become one of few core memories in hindsight. It's also one I cherish: that adrenaline, that anxiety, that pure concentration on a single thing shared by 21 others, how humans generate meaning out of nothing; it was like a glimpse into the many ways life can be experienced, however brief it might actually have been.
I think I didn't even go the next time since I rememberd that one of the trainers was actually quite scary. I think they just spoke too loud for anxious little furball me. That the other kids laughed at me for bringing Coca-Cola instead of water was maybe also related to my faded enthusiasm after thinking through my first experience. They were right to mock me though, it was pretty cringe in hindsight and you can't be too hard with kids as kids are kids, right?
Other Things I Quit
- running
- playing guitar (even though I'd say I consciously transitioned to playing piano instead)
- playing piano (kind of)
- climbing / bouldering (not accepted the quitting yet)
- soccer, taekwondo
- crocheting
- collecting Diddl sheets
not my collection, just examples for the sheet design from the link
- collecting friends in a friend book
- some friends
- SchülerVZ for Facebook, then Facebook
- keeping a dream journal to help with lucid dreaming (I still have the journal though)
- smoking (multiple times)
- going to school (for a few months)
- maintaining a status page built with Grafana + Prometheus for my VPN and home network and every device in it and therefore being on the verge of moral decay by plotting when flatmates are home using data from the router but I was able to resist this power of data that I discovered (it felt so weird I didn't even ask for permission to use it)
- playing CTFs and being an active member of the university CTF team that regularly participates in the DEFCON CTF onsite (I never really was, too much on and off for years)
- PC gaming because I became a total Linux fanboy and hate Windows with a passion
My Vision of Stacker News
I've actually intended to write about my vision for Stacker News because that sounded cool in the moment. Somehow that resulted in me rambling about quitting. That sounds like I am thinking to quit SN but it's actually about quite the opposite: I am thinking about how to NOT quit something I love doing again because I apparently just don't like routines to the point it's ruining my life.
Something about routines must scare me on a deep level. I mean, I am a programmer and as one I love routines. Such encapsulation, much easy to reason about, stack-smashing fun. But routines in life? That sounds like my life is over. That's it, I will forever do the same things over and over again like a true pure function so I might as well smash my own stack and see what's on the other side of that
RET instruction, assuming the universe is written in x86 assembly.I can't for the hell of it keep a consistent sleep routine even though I know how much happier I am when I routinely see the sun (writing this fully awake at 4am 5am 7am now) or when I get stuff done early in the morning (especially on a routine). But I also hate how it gets old to just have to do that or have to do this. Life is full of all these small routines, it makes you wonder if life is just one big routine. It doesn't help that you can pick which routine you want, it's still a routine in the end. Spiraling down this train of thought, you wonder if free will is just this meme:
The hardest routine trap consists of "you just have to listen to your body". Sometimes, I am convinced that just my body is tired and it's holding me back and most of me knows that it's irrational, dumb and we should definitely listen to our bodies since we're "trapped" inside them and we'll else have to suffer the consequences later but then stubborn, arrogant little me that never grew up, has no intentions of doing so and just has to do SO MANY things it doesn't want takes over and says:
But do we have to do that EVERY time now? Can't you like stop adulting for a few minutes and just HAVE SOME FUN instead? We also HAVE TO have some fun, right?!
Then I get stuck in a "just one more thing"-loop until I am not even tired anymore and going to sleep is now just a question of how fucked up my sleep schedule should be.
It's almost as if I have to regularly experience how good something is by depriving myself of it.
However, I fortunately also notice how it's getting easier and easier to become aware of all these little decisions that seem insignificant in the moments but still consistently lead to significantly worse periods in my life. A pattern of the little kid and what triggers it, how it can be reasoned with, stuff like that is basically emerging (it's about time). It's really nice to be able to shake off the urge to smoke something by simply coughing and getting reminded of how bad I used to cough because of it so we better not start again. Or looking at that cup of iced coffee and feeling like you need to throw up because you can already taste how mind-boggling sweet it is so you lose all desire to actually drink it even though it was something you used to look forward to every day. It feels a bit like reading the code of life and it's indeed x86 assembly. Just a bunch of "if this then that"-s with a few variables in your control. Additionally, you not only see how easy it is to lose a good track in life (which helps with avoidance) but also how easy it is to get back on track.
Maybe that's what growing up is about? How to be responsibly irresponsible?
That sounds cool, I'll write that down.
Oh well, now I rambled a little about my love for routines instead of some vision of SN. But I also wanted to write about how I even got here and appreciating it and what I think how SN might turn out on some interesting time scales. Mhh, maybe most of it another time but here's what I can already share:
When I was in Austin and @MaxAWebster was visiting, he asked me what I think where SN will be in five years (or something like that, I don't remember the exact question). I responded that I really don't know but I hope that Reddit is no more and maybe something about how SN at least lead the way how to make social media suck less? In hindsight, I wished I had a better answer but I am still quite happy with my performance during the conversation since I wasn't as nervous as I can be when I meet new people; I was actually quite relaxed (maybe @MaxAWebster's enthusiastic energy is just too reassuring that you can't mess up talking to him). I also didn't think of it as a VC checking out the first employee of one of the startups they are invested in; it was a very casual and typical water cooler chat (but I was wondering about it in hindsight).
Anyway, back to my "vision": it's simply still being here in 5 years. It's not a very detailed vision since I actually like the openness about it. "Still being here" can mean many things but it definitely means that SN still exists and I am a part of it. At the pace the space we're in is progressing (nostr wasn't really a thing until early last year imo) and considering internal plans to decentralize further (not only going non-custodial for the wallets but everything), it's definitely exciting to think about though. Excitingly enough that I can see myself actually committing to something for so many years (next to the "golden handcuffs").
To make the vision a bit more concrete, I'd say that in 5 years, I'd like to see following things:
- @k00b doesn't have to fund the rewards with 100k sats each day anymore
- well-run territories are profitable and no longer an unsustainable "labor of love"
- there are many interesting territory models, not just one "meta" that gets stale like in games
- territories really feel like territories like autonomous systems on the internet
- people don't claim that tags would have been better than territories anymore
- we've ventured a bit into virtual spaces, for example as an addition to the saloon
- site is very stable and still easy to contribute to
- iOS push notifications work
(maybe in this order)
The End
567amHail @ek! Hail @ek! Hail @ek!